


Out of the Silence: The Infernal War

by ashesandhoney



Series: The Infernal War [1]
Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: AU Bad Guys Win, Dystopia, F/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-02-16 01:18:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 27
Words: 74,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story reimagines the Infernal Devices novels as they might have been if the villain had won and the heroine hadn’t been rescued at the start of Clockwork Angel. </p><p>It includes a lot of William Herondale being angsty, some graphic violence, some sexy vampire blood drinking scenes, a character who can’t speak, Magnus pretending he doesn’t care, Sophie not taking shit and not quite as many dead main characters as the prologue chapter would lead you to believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This is How You Die

**Author's Note:**

> The story will not be told in strict chronological order so the date is listed at the top of each chapter.

* * *

 Tessa Gray

March 24, 1881

* * *

 

The carriage passed under gates inscribed in Latin and approached the grand cathedral with its doors thrown open to the mild spring air. Unconsciously the girl in a fashionable blue gown leaned her head back to take in the soaring facade. She looked at the other person in the carriage but he was looking out the other window. She rubbed her thumb over a scar on her palm. When he turned to look at her, her gloves were in place and she was silent and composed.

“Come along darling,” he said holding out a hand as a footman opened the door. She didn’t so much give him her hand as let him take it from her. She considered every possible fight she could put up but they all ended painfully and she let him help her down to the cobbles.

Her brother had died in this building. She’d been told that so many times that the sentence barely had meaning any more. Nathaniel had been killed by Shadowhunters because they were cruel and malicious. She glanced at the man walking in front of her. He was much older than she was, well dressed and chatting with another man on the steps of the building.

Nathaniel would never have been caught infiltrating the Shadowhunters’ Institute if Axel Mortmain hadn’t sent him to do it. She ran through the things he told her and compared them to the things she knew to be true. It was a daily ritual. Some people said prayers, some people counted blessings, she cataloged lies. The day she started to believe them would be the day she had truly lost herself and she was going to hold that day off as long as she could.

The party beyond the doors was lavish and bright. Lit both by a blue-white lamps and lanterns strung over a dance floor. It might have been beautiful but Mortmain held her by the arm and nothing was beautiful when she was that close to him.

She let her eyes wander over the marble floors. She knew the story. Mortmain’s army of automatons had invaded this place, taken the pyxis that held souls prisoner and taught the Nephilim a lesson in humility. It was a great victory. She cataloged the lies and looked to see if the the marble was still stained with blood or if there were still gouges cut out of railings or beams as someone had fought for their life.

There was no evidence of the attacks of the winter of 1879. It was just a fancy church with a ballroom. She took the champagne that was offered but didn’t take more than a sip for politeness’s sake. It wasn’t safe to be less than perfectly alert.

The man who ran the Institute was a Nephilim but also an ally. He was apparently immune to the arrogance and cruelty of the rest of his people or perhaps he was just useful to Mortmain. She didn’t call out the hypocrisy of destroying a race of people and then befriending the remaining ones if they were useful enough.

She wasn’t sure which of them was worse. Probably this Benedict Lightwood, it was his people who had been destroyed after all. She curtsied and lifted her mouth in something that impersonated a smile but said nothing to him when they were introduced.

She was finally released with an approved dance card of important strangers to charm. She wouldn’t. She would dance but she wouldn’t do more than that. There would be interesting insults to collect and perhaps she would be lucky enough to avoid any of Mortmain’s crueler friends who would find ways in the course of a public dance to leave bruises.

She looked up at the carving of the angel with outstretched wings who watched over the ballroom and wondered if it was more than a story. Was there anything out there left to care about what Mortmain had done and would do?

 

* * *

 William Herondale

March 24, 1881

* * *

 

 Across town, while Mortmain and his allies were busy drinking champagne and talking about their plans for the future, a young man who had once fought for his life in the room that the girl in the gown had passed through was breaking into a house.

William Herondale had been there in the spring of 1878 when the Shadowhunters of the London Institute had investigated the Pandemonium Club and the disappearance of countless mundanes. He had been there when they’d found a broken automaton in the basement of a brothel that spouted warnings of their impending doom. He had been there when destruction had arrived at their doorstep on the morning of January 7, 1879.

Now he stood in shadows and watched Mortmain’s automaton guard crisscross the yard of a mansion.

He was alone. Sophie, had told him that the next time he went out alone to do something dangerous she was going to wash her hands of him and leave him to rot in whatever predicament he landed himself in. She had been a maid once, now she was the heart and soul of a resistance movement made up of the dregs of Britain’s Nephilim who had managed to survive the concerted attacks that had destroyed not just London but all the Institutes of the British Isles.

Will was a dreg. The last bit left over after everything good had been swept away. He wasn’t the leader that Charlotte had been. He wasn’t the genius that Henry still tried to be on the days when he could function through his grief. He certainly wasn’t the good man that Jem had been before he’d been killed.

Jem who had been dying as long as Will had known him hadn’t died at the hands of illness though he was weak enough by the end that standing for long periods of time was nearly impossible. If he’d been stronger, if he hadn’t sent Will for help, if it had only been automatons and not the contingent of vampires who came up the back entrance and broke into the sanctuary from that side.

If.

But if wouldn’t bring anyone back. Will tried to do the best he could without them. He tried to let the memory of Charlotte guide him and to hear that little conscience in his head that always spoke with Jem’s voice. That voice was telling he was an idiot. Tonight he was ignoring it. A chance like this where Mortmain was in the city but away from his home was unlikely to happen again soon. There were secrets in there worth having.

He watched the automaton guards make one more pass to be sure that he had the timing correct before he jumped the fence. He probably should have brought someone to watch his back but he hated going out on these patrols, on the bombing missions, on the breaking and entering missions with anyone who wasn't his parabatai. And as his parabatai wasn't an option he went alone unless someone else refused to let him.

"That's how you will die," Sophie had said after his last close call, "You will die alone because you don't let anyone help you."

He had believed her.

He just hadn't expected it to happen today. 

 

 


	2. Blood and Temptations

* * *

James Carstairs

June 30, 1879

* * *

 

James Carstairs was dead. He hadn't expected to live to twenty so it wasn't really much of a surprise but he also hadn't expected to get up the next day. He hadn't expected to have to claw his way out of a grave only to be fed a first meal of rancid blood before being tossed in a cage in an empty space that was more cave than room. He'd expected being dead to be peaceful or at the very least to hurt less than dying had.

It was a lonely existence. The room was empty except for the cage. The cage was empty except for him. He was empty except for rushing thoughts. For those first few weeks, the isolation seemed like it must be the worst thing in the world. He was wrong but he didn't know that yet.

When the door clattered open every few days it would be one of the automatons who set a bottle of blood in front of him and then disappeared. It wasn't one of the true monsters that had led vampires and ruin into the London Institute. Those ones thought and planned. This one carried bottles and that was it.

There were three bottles on the little tray it carried and it only ever gave him one. He'd given up moving much. He was too weak to do much more than line up his bottles and use them to count the time. Eventually that wasn’t enough and the bottles became a game. After the new one was dropped off, he'd try and hit the thing in the head with one of the old ones. His aim suffered as he skirted the starvation line and it never reacted even when he managed to smash the glass across shiny metal back or head. It wasn't a good game.

He looked up as the door creaked open. The floor between him and the door was littered with shattered glass and dried blood spatter. It was probably a horrific sight. He couldn't tell any more. It was the only sight he had. He was probably horrific as well. He had always been thin but he could tell from his hands that his skin was pulling tight across his joints, making them look skeletal. Starvation didn’t look good on anyone, even the dead. 

What came through the door wasn't metal. That he knew before the door opened all the way. He could smell it. Smell blood under skin and he locked his jaw shut against the thirst that suddenly clawed its way to life in his stomach and climbed his throat. A scream climbed with it and if he opened his mouth, he would let it out. Had he been around anything alive since he'd risen from that grave plot? He couldn't remember clearly any more.

"... one of my other pets, this one is a little better behaved," a man's voice with a careful, clipped accent said. Jem forced his eyes open. The man had been in the Sanctuary of the Institute. Jem remembered him issuing orders to metal men and vampires alike. He wore a dark blue suit and had neatly cut hair. He looked like a banker. He led an automaton who held a girl by her arm and pulled her along with them.

Across the ocean of shattered glass, she looked at him and her eyes widened just a fraction farther in fear. She pulled against the metal hand that held her. It was a struggle that had been ongoing. Her dress along that sleeve was torn and she was too tired to put up much of a fight. Her eyes darted between the man in the suit and Jem as though trying to assess the larger threat. Jem didn't feel like a threat to any one but the thirst pounded against his temples and twisted in his stomach and promised him that he could be a threat if he was just let it out. The automaton brought the girl over the glass, simply lifting her and carrying her as the man walked along the outside of the room where the glass hadn't reached and rejoined them in front of the cage.

Jem could see the pulse hammering in the side of her throat and see her chest rise and fall with shuddering breaths. She was terrified. He wanted to say something, anything to calm her but there was nothing to say and he didn't trust himself to move an inch, to open his mouth at all.

"See, not nearly so dangerous as the last one," the man said and her eyes squeezed shut and she looked away from both of them. "She had a nasty run in with Aloysious early. He was hungry, nearly tore her arm off. She's lucky I have such a talented doctor," he grabbed her arm and twisted it around so Jem could see the skin of her forearm which was unmarked, not even a scar. Her pulse hammered at her wrist as well. He was painfully aware of the blood smell. Had blood always had a smell? It was a tangible thing in the room. It pressed. Pressed against him like hands, like mouths. He knew that vampires were fast and he wondered if he could get a hold of the man and bite him before the automaton reacted. He was loathe to touch the girl but the man was another matter. He could have killed the man in the suit with no guilt if he a weapon in hand so why not use teeth? What use was it to be a monster if you weren't willing to do monstrous things?

"This is the game, my darling," the man was talking to the girl. He stroked the skin of her wrist with his thumb and she barely breathed when he touched her. Fear yes, but also something like disgust. Jem considered his muscles and found them still locked in place but too weak to do much good.

"You can say the words," the man told her. "Or I can put you in there with the little silver shadowhunter. He hasn't been a vampire long. He's never drank blood out of a vein. His self control won't be very good." She made a little noise that was half sob and half gasp. "He doesn't want to hurt you. You can see that, can't you? But he will. He will because you smell lovely." She tried to pull away but could do little more than strain against the man's hand the monster's clawed grip. "The angel, will save you. It will come to life and drive him off before he can do too much damage just like it did last time. But it does hurt to have teeth tear through your skin doesn't it?"

Her eyes were squeezed shut and she was forcing her breathing into an even rhythm. The effort of suppressing the panic was in every line of her body. But she stayed silent. The man watched her carefully, looking for a break in her resolve but her mouth stayed tightly shut, lips a near white line.

Jem would have stopped breathing if he hadn't given it up already. She was going to take her chances in the cage with him. Whatever the man wanted her to say was worse than being put in a cage with a half starved vampire. He felt terror of his own start to curl around the hunger in his stomach.

The man was right.

Jem was going to hurt her. He clenched his fists into the remains of his suit jacket. He was going to hurt her. There would be no way to control himself. He could barely control himself with them on the other side of the bars.

When the door swung open for the first time since he had been put inside, all thoughts of attacking the man were gone. He pushed himself into the corner farthest from the door and watched them. The automaton placed the girl into the cage and the man tied her hands outside the bars so she was attached to the wall. She didn’t struggle but it wasn’t because she was defeated. There was defiance in her eyes. If he wasn’t paralyzed by hunger and fear, he’d have been impressed by that look. It was a look that said, you can kill me but you can't break me.

The door was swung shut and Jem made sure he did not inhale. If he didn't inhale he wouldn't have to smell her. She smelled like warmth and something gently spicy. Her breathing was uneven and her heart rate fast. So scared. So very scared.

"I have other things to do," the man said touching her face through the bars once the door was locked. "The automatons will return when someone starts screaming. Doesn’t matter which of you. Until then they'll wait outside. It will take them a little while to get back inside, these aren't my fastest models." He turned and spoke to Jem directly, "She doesn’t speak, she refuses to complete my spell, one I have planned since before her birth. It is ungrateful but she is an independent little thing. She won’t speak but I trust you can get a scream out of her." Then he took a small knife out of his pocket and ran it along her collarbone, leaving a thin, shallow cut. Jem flinched harder than the girl did.

She rubbed her cheek against her shoulder as though she could rub off his touch and Jem watched the way her neck moved and the little trail of blood as it started to well up. He closed his eyes. He didn't breathe. He didn't open them until he heard the door slam shut. The man had left her alone, tied to wall, to be eaten. Rage slammed through the hunger and cleared his mind for a moment. 

"I won't hurt you," he said in a hoarse whisper. It wasn't the scream he had feared but in order to pull in the air to speak he also got a rush of her scent. Spicy, warm, fresh somehow like laundry hung out on a sunny afternoon. He leaned towards her and then pulled back harshly. The cage was just over six feet square. He couldn't even lie down in it but she was far enough away that he couldn't touch her from his corner. 

"I won't hurt you," he repeated but it was less of a promise this time as a wish.

He opened his eyes. The blood wasn't flowing quickly, just a thin trail running down pale skin toward the bodice of the dress she wore. Her hair was loose around her face, knocked out of pins while she'd struggled. Her arm under the ripped sleeve was bruised in layers, he could see the partially healed bruises under the fresh ones. The anger on her behalf beat against his chest. 

She watched him. Wary. Not as terrified as she had been a moment before or maybe she just hid it better. Her skin was unmarked so she wasn’t a Shadowhunter. A mundane perhaps, either his age or maybe younger. Pretty. She had steady, grey eyes. Determined. There were no tears. She hadn't broken her silence. He believed that if he sunk his teeth into her, she still wouldn't say whatever it was the monster in the suit wanted her to say.

He was halfway across the cage to her before he realized what he was doing and froze. He saw the change in her expression before he understood why. Widening eyes, a partially opened mouth. Fear. Don't think about teeth, he admonished himself. He inched forward again. She was warm. He could feel it now. Not close enough to be touching but all he had to do was reach out a hand.

"I'm not strong enough for this," he breathed out which was the wrong thing to do because this close the scent grabbed him like a hand around his throat which pulled him forward. He regained himself with his hands on the bars on either side of her head. He felt her breath, fast and panicky against his face. He shook his hair out of his face, planning to raise his eyes to meet hers, to say something comforting. The smell had him now. He leaned down and ran his tongue over the cut and they both shuddered but for different reasons.

It was like nothing he had ever tasted and it felt a little like a dose of the drug he'd spent most of his life addicted to. It came with that rush of energy and relief and also that thick cloying shame of needing it. The drug though had never hurt anyone but himself. This would hurt her. And he couldn't stop.

He worried at the cut a little with his lips, pulling more blood from it. It was surface cut, not a blood vessel. Not enough. Not nearly enough. He sucked again, the taste of her skin mixing with the tang of the blood itself. Her whole body shook and he was close enough to feel it. 

Violently, he pushed himself off the bars and away from her. He had never once taken enough of the the yin fen. He was used to not nearly enough of the one thing that would make the pain stop. The thing was just different now. No longer a silver powder, now a thick red liquid. Something else he could never have enough of.

He leaned against the bars across from her, the taste of her blood on his tongue. She stared at him. Lips parted, eyes wide, skin flushed. He could see the little marks his mouth had left on her chest but the cut was starting to fade. Vampire saliva promoted healing, it kept victims from bleeding out. He hadn't bitten her. He felt insanely relieved that he hadn't bitten her. He laughed a little which pushed him over into full blown hysterical laughter, the first emotional reaction he had had since he'd sent Will out the back door of the sanctuary.

"I can untie you," he said when he pulled himself together and she composed her expression from shock to something like polite interest and nodded.

Being close to her was hard. He could hear the blood in her skin. _Hers, not yours_ , he told himself, _you can't have it_. He reached around her to fumble the knots loose. She straightened. She was tall and raised her chin to look him in the eye. He hadn't bitten her. He still wanted to but he hadn't done it. Yet.

"Real blood is better than whatever they've been bringing me," he said and then immediately felt like an ass. "I'm sorry, that was an inappropriate thing to say. I'm sorry for drinking from you. I'm sorry that he put you in here. I'm sorry that you're hurt." His finger tips brushed her bruised arm and he jerked away thinking, _Too forward by half, Carstairs_. She was standing closer to him than he expected her to be when he looked back. She touched his face and rubbed something off the corner of his mouth and he had a horrified moment to realize it was blood. She was wiping her own blood off his mouth. He felt faintly sick. His self control hung by a thread. He was still too close to starving and he knew what she tasted like now.

“You need to be farther away,” he said to her and the world looked different as his pupils dilated, a fine red tint over everything.

She shook her head and pushed her hair over her shoulder and tilted her chin over, giving him a full view of the far too vulnerable column of her throat.

“Why would you offer that?” he asked. She brushed a finger along the circles under his eyes. Her fingers were painfully warm, “Don’t offer that for my good. I’ll be fine without that. You don’t owe me that. I don’t know if I could stop again.”

She looked at the door and then pushed the sleeve of the dress up to give him a full view of the bruises and he understood the rest of the reason, “Getting bit is better than him?” he asked and she frowned at him just a little and he realized what the problem was and said softly, “No, that’s not it. He’ll be worse if you escape this uninjured. He’ll do something worse.”

She looked uncomfortable as she nodded, not making eye contact. He stepped away from her and sat down heavily. She sat beside him, not touching but less than an arm length away. Watching. Vampires were allowed by law to drink from willing victims. She wasn’t truly willing though. She was gambling that he was less of a monster than the man who had locked them in here.

“What if I tear out you throat? Or drain every drop?” he asked. The look on her face was so deeply wretched that he reached out and pulled her towards him. She tensed, eyes widening in fear as he cupped her face in his hands.

“I won’t do that. I can, I won't, I'll be strong enough,” he said. “But don't you do that either. Don’t give up. Don’t. Hope comes from the strangest places. Don’t let him destroy you. You’re stronger than he is. I’ve known you for less than an hour and I know that.” He could hear Will’s tone of insistence in his voice and smiled a little. He’d never believed Will when he’d told him there was a cure. He hadn’t ever believed that Will believed it either but he suddenly understood the need to say it. To offer hope when there was none.

She relaxed and closed her eyes against a shine of tears. Jem tried not to wonder how long it had been since someone was kind to her. He was shocked when she leaned into him but he put his arms around as she settled her head on his shoulder and he put his chin on her hair. He kept muttering promises and assurances that he couldn’t keep.

Her head tilted up to him and she turned his head down to look at her with a hand on his cheek. She was so close and so warm. Then she offered him her throat again. Her body was rigid in his arms, offering but terrified. It was more than his self control could fight against. If she'd tried to run or fight, he could have done it but she had leaned into him and offered instead. He was so hungry that it hurt.

He hesitated long enough to whisper, “I won’t hurt you, I promise I won’t hurt you.” Before sinking his teeth through that barrier of skin and drawing the rush of blood into his mouth. He held her closer. Cradling her as best as he could, as close as he could. She gasped and murmured and then relaxed. Vampire bites had their own kind of drug. He didn’t know if it was a chemical or magic that made her smile as her eyes fluttered shut and her body relaxed into his.

When her hand lost its strength and released its hold on his shirt he became aware of something other than the taste and the relief from the hunger. Her heart beat was slowing. The angel that was supposed to protect her lay against her skin ticking gently. Jem touched her face, touched her hair, tried to get her to look at him but got only fluttering eyelashes and a fleeting smile. He laid her down gently, carefully placing her head against the stone floor before he let out a scream that brought the monsters in their metal bodies lumbering into the room to drag her away.

He regretted letting them take her instantly and even the shame of having done that to her didn’t out balance that horror. She’d wake up to face the dizziness of blood loss and whatever situation had left all those bruises on her arms. Stronger than he’d been in years he slammed a fist into the bars of his cage and watched his split knuckles heal with unnatural speed.

“Goddamn it,” he said to the empty room before collapsing back into the corner of his cage and letting himself cry.  


	3. An Impossible Rescue

* * *

William Herondale

March 25, 1881

* * *

 

 

The house was on a well warded and patrolled piece of greenery in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in London. It looked lovely and well decorated. Will assumed it would have been lovely lwere he above ground. He wasn’t. He was in a room in a basement that smelled like damp and the copper scent of blood. His blood.

It hadn’t been an enjoyable afternoon.

He hung, alone in the dark, from a pair of manacles attached to his wrists on one end and some point on the ceiling on the other. He hung there with a little phrase playing over and over in his head: “If no one cares for you, do you exist at all?” How much he hurt seemed like good evidence for still existing but the words were there anyways. They always were. Pages and pages of words written in a careful, strong handwriting by a girl held captive in a large dark abandoned brothel. Words written for the brother who had left her there to be tortured and beaten as part of a training program in magics Will didn’t understand. But he understood so much of what she had written.

They’d found the letters addressed to Nathaniel Gray tucked under a mattress of a bed with ropes still hanging off the posts from where someone had been tied down. The last one had been dated only four days before the Shadowhunters had traced the Pandemonium Club’s trail to the big, empty building in the spring of 1878. She was gone by then. Only the letters to indicate that she had ever existed at all. Will kept them all. He still had them. The warlocks, the Dark Sisters who had held her were gone as well. All that was left was a shattered automaton and the remains of a dissection lab. Will had never met the girl but her words twisted through with Jem’s when he couldn’t sleep.

Mortmain himself interrupted Will’s mental recitation of her words. Will had been beaten half unconscious and was still dealing with a fog in his brain. He had been trying to calm himself enough to think. Will tried to open his eyes when he heard the voices. One of them had swollen shut, the other stung which probably meant blood or something else had run into it. The room was dark but when the door opened it was lit by magic. Will's good eye was blurry. He tried to blink his vision clear in the greenish light of the torches on the walls.

Mortmain looked like a banker. Will knew this, he'd seen him from a distance before. He was talking and Will couldn't make out the words through the ringing in his ears. He must have been hit hard. Mortmain was putting on a show for a girl in a pink dress. Will focused his single eye on her. Pretty, brown hair, very wide eyes, terrified and a little disgusted. She tried to draw away but didn't fight Mortmain when he drew her into the room. He was telling her about crushing the Shadowhunter resistance and how Will was an important part of this. Will spat a mixture that mostly blood at them, some of it landed on her dress. He would have preferred it to have hit Mortmain's smug face but she stumbled away and he took advantage of the moment of confusion that resulted. He drew himself up on his exhausted arms and lashed out with a kick that hit Mortmain across the side of that smug face. It was more satisfying that spitting had been.

He heard the girl scream and Mortmain swear but the pain of pulling open every wound he had was making his vision blur and the world was fading fast.

"Break his legs," he heard Mortmain say before the world exploded into pain that pulled him down into oblivion.

 

* * *

 

It was hours later before he was aware of anything again. He lay face down on the cold damp stone floor. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. There was a faint glow beyond his closed eyes. Lantern light this time. Not the green flame of the torches, just orange glow. There was a burn of a stele on his shoulder, sharp and familiar.

"Jem," he muttered even though it couldn't be Jem but then it wasn't happening so if he was going to have a fever dream before he died of blood loss, he could at least have a fever dream about the person he most wanted to see again.

"Jem?" a soft voice answered him. A girl's voice. She had a wet cloth in her hand and was wiping blood off his face. He didn’t open his eyes quite yet. Her hands were gentle and the water was warm. There were worse dreams to have while you’re dying. 

"Jem's not here," Will said. She didn't answer him. The iratze, it must have been an iratze, she had drawn had started to work and his head was clearing which wasn't really a blessing as everything hurt so much he was choking on the pain like it was a physical thing. He remembered the order to break his legs but didn't remember it actually happening. The next decision, to try and move one brought shrieking pain. He tried to clench his teeth down on the scream and only halfway succeed. Dying perhaps but not dead yet. 

"How bad are my legs?" he asked her. He heard a sharp intake of breath. "Bad?"

He forced his eye open and she nodded but said nothing. It was the girl that Mortmain had brought to see him tortured. She still wore that pink dress with his blood down the front of it. She knelt beside him and the blood was soaking into the fabric at her knees. He wondered how much blood one could lose before one died. She had a small, persistent frown on her face.

“Are you part of some elaborate trick?” he asked. She shook her head, frown deepening.

"Will you help me leave?" he asked and she nodded.

“You’re going to need to set the bones in my legs. Then use an iratze,” he said grimacing at just the thought of how much that would hurt. She wasn’t likely to have medical training and looked faint and nervous. It wasn’t reassuring but he continued, "Run your hand down, when you find a bone that is sticking out, push it back in, it'll be hell for everyone including the neighbours."

She looked up as though she could see through the ceiling above.

"Who else is in the house?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You're not very talkative," he said. "Mortmain's not here?" Head shake. "There are guards?" She nodded.

Then she closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths as though preparing for something painful. Then gasped out the single word, "Outside." Before clamping a hand over her mouth as a shudder ran through her. It was a startling reaction and Will didn't ask for explanation because she'd have to speak again and he didn't want to force that on her. 

"Ok. You’ll need to keep me quiet to keep them there. Use a rune of quietude," he said but she looked at him blankly. She was a shadowhunter, she must be to use a stele but she didn't know all the runes. He tested his hand it seemed to be working. He held out his hand and she placed the stele in it. He recognized it. It was his. She must have stolen it out of the pile of his things during the chaos after he'd kicked Mortmain. She had planned this. He looked at her more closely. A kind girl was one thing. A kind girl who was smart enough to defy a murderous maniac was quite another.

"Did I at least hurt him?" Will asked.

She gave him the ghost of a smile and mimed breaking a stick and then ran a finger over her cheek bone. He would have grinned if half his face wasn't still swollen. He probably had a similar break.

"Good," he said and she gave him another twitch of ghost smile. "When you set the bones, they don't need to be perfect. The runes will do most of the work but the bones need to be close enough to touch where they're supposed to be. Don't look so worried."

The look of concern on her face made him reach out to touch her. He took her hand and squeezed gently. Her hand felt very small and very warm in his. He put as much feeling as he could into the two words, "Thank you." She was taking a risk even being in this room with him. That'd she'd try to help him and care whether she hurt him seemed something beyond imagining. He was the last person to deserve an angel and yet here she was and he wanted her to know that he appreciated her.

The smile he got this time was still a ghost but it lingered a little longer. She squeezed his hand back. Then she cut his trousers open to the knee and pushed his shins back into place while he screamed silently against the rune he’d drawn on his own throat. When it was over, the iratzes in place, one on each knee, she came to sit by his head. She was breathing erratically and there were tears in the corners of her eyes. He couldn't speak yet, even once he'd removed the rune he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he'd vomit and he didn't want to do that in front of her.

Being stubborn and possibly a bit of an idiot he decided that he should try and sit up. He made it but the rush of pain and the dizziness of blood loss almost brought him down again. He braced himself on his hands so that he didn't fall. His back was going to be a mess of scar tissue by the time the healing was over but at least it was just the trails of a whip and not more broken bones. Broken bones, he decided, were horrendous.

He felt her hand on his shoulder. He raised his head to look at her. She touched his forehead with shaking fingers and he managed to open both eyes this time. Her lips were pressed into a tight line and her eyebrows were knitted together. There was a smear on her cheek that was probably blood. Those eyes were observant and intelligent and took in his injuries. They were some light colour but he hadn’t been paying enough attention before to say which one, blue maybe?

The lantern cast shadows on her face. At her throat was a necklace. A tiny metal angel with folded wings. He looked up at her and then back down at it again. The description from the wastrel brother of the girl in the brothel came back to him. Were her eyes gray? She didn't look like him. Nathaniel, that was his name, had spoken of the clockwork angel that she wore and she had mentioned it in her letters.

"Tessa," he said to her. "Tessa Gray." Her mouth fell open and she started to speak a few times but said nothing. Her mouth twisted and her head tilted in confusion.

"We found the house where you were held when you arrived in London," he said, "There were letters hidden in a room. I read them. I've met your brother." At the mention of her brother her dawning comprehension became grief and anger for just a moment before it all faded away.

"He's dead," Will told her. She nodded, she knew that. "I'm sorry," he said and he brushed a finger over her cheek, "He was a bastard but he was family for you. I know you loved him." He did know but it was such an unusual thing to know about someone you’d just met. She had existed in his head for so long, it was impossible to have her in front of him, a stranger. She wasn't a stranger to him but he was to her. Her eyes were not quite the way he'd imagined them. Her face more serious. The tears spilled and he brushed them away. She didn’t draw away from him. A moment later, she’d regained her composure with a series of short, shuddering breaths.

"I can't stand yet," he said, testing his legs. She held up the stele and he shook his head. More iratzes would exhaust him. It was just going to take time. She got up smoothly and left the room. "Tessa?" She didn't answer him but she was back a few moments later with a glass of water and food. She held out the water first and he forced himself to stop before he drained the entire glass and did send his body into vomiting. As he picked at the bread, he asked her questions.

She was nervous. More nervous than she'd been before she knew that he'd read her letters. They'd been personal. They hadn't been meant for strangers. He knew her much more than she knew him. She rubbed her thumb over the palm of her hand as though it was a comforting gesture. Her eyes darted to and from his face.

He told her his name, where he'd grown up, that he'd had sisters though saying anything more about them was too painful. How he'd gotten caught. She listened, that twitch of a smile coming out for his jokes but never laughing. She started to relax. She paid careful attention to everything. Careful and intelligent. He knew that from the letters but it was different to see it on a person. She wasn't a figment of his imagination, he was fairly certain fever dreams didn't reset your bones to blinding pain.

"Jem?" she asked him and he remembered that that had been the first thing he'd said to her.

"Jem was my brother, we were parabatai," he said. "He's dead." She shook her head which he took as sympathy but she shook her head harder.

Will frowned and told her, "He's dead, Sophie saw it happen. When the institute was attacked a vampire killed him." He left out that he’d seen the blood stain when he’d finally made it back with the remains of the Blackthorn family, the rest of whom had been murdered in a similar attack that happened at almost the same moment. He didn’t tell her the crushing grief of it. Jem had been dying but losing him like that felt worse. He had been too weak by that point to so much as stand on his own for more than a few moments at a time and they’d torn his throat out.

"No," she said and once again there was that wince as though speaking was physically painful for her.

"He died," Will said because it was true and he knew that it was true because he had felt it. He had felt the line that had connected them snap. It had been almost gentle, just a tug and then an emptiness. Gone. Gone. Gone. There wasn't another explanation.

Except there was. Because it had been vampires.

She watched him, shaking her head, waiting for him to understand.

"They turned him," Will whispered and then with more vehemence, "Those fucking bastards."

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Jem was always going to die. Will had long ago accepted it though he'd never been prepared for it. Jem was prepared for it. And instead of his death, his release from a life that had been short and painful he had been changed into a blood drinker who could never set foot in sunlight again.

The rest of it fell into place, "You've seen him."

She nodded. She was wary of him again as though afraid of what he would do. He had heard the anger in his own voice and he tried to push it down out of his expression because there was concern in her eyes as well. Who was this girl? What had he ever done in his life to be deserving of meeting her?

"Jem's alive," Will said. "Or at least, Jem's not dead."

She nodded again and gave him another one of those fleeting smiles of hers. He tried to commit it to memory before it was gone. Then she got up and left again.

He tried to follow her but the bones in his legs, though reattached, were not strong enough to support him. He sat back down heavily and glared at the wall. She came back with a pocket notebook which she handed to him and then brought the lantern close enough that he could read it. The first few pages were poorly done doodles and the starts of words which became the same phrase in latin. Each time she'd written it, she'd crossed it out and scribbled over it until it was obscured. There were also missing pages, leaving ripped and ragged edges. He recognized her handwriting, as familiar as his own.

Then there were the pages she'd intended to show him. These were written in a narrower hand but just as familiar. It was one side of a conversation. Will realized what it had been intended to be. It had been intended as a way for her to communicate. Phrases she might need to use that she could have pointed to since she couldn't say them. Simple things, "Can you pass me that?" and "How are you today?" but it had degenerated into silliness. Will could hear Jem's voice in those words. "But I have never liked braised duck!" and a fragment of Chinese that he couldn't read and "There is no reason I will ever need to say that again" and "You aren't funny Mr. Carstairs, please shut up." Then there were the pages of runes. Jem had taught her to draw an iratze and the open rune she must have used on the door. Taught her in scratched pencil marks that she had traced. Two handwriting styles, passed back and forth.

Will squeezed his eyes shut so he wouldn't cry. He wanted to sob or scream or beat the hell out of something. Jem had saved his life a hundred times and here he was doing it again. Three years dead and Jem had given this girl everything she needed to save Will’s life. She reached out to touch his face and whispered a soft comforting little shush. He couldn't remember the last time someone had done something like that for him. It wasn't really affection, just kindness but it nearly caused him to lose the last of his composure. He wanted to wrap her around himself. He wasn't sure he knew how to cry any more but he wished he could crawl into her lap like a little boy and hold on.

"Where is he?" Will asked her shoving all that feeling down beneath the mask he’d worn for so many years. She shrugged and shook her head and showed him a poorly done sketch of a high ceilinged room that might have been a cave. She held up three fingers. It took a couple of guesses for him to figure out that the three meant it took three days to get there from London.

"We can figure it out," he said and was surprised that he meant it. In that moment he believed in miracles and the possibility of storming Mortmain's fortress in the wilds of England somewhere and winning. Reality pushed at the edge of the fantasy but for just a few moments he clung to optimism. It was a foreign thing but he wanted so badly to believe in miracles even for a moment.

"Shall we?" he asked and she stood. He needed to lean on the wall. He needed a day in bed. She gathered up everything she'd brought down and he got his gear jacket and weapon's belt from where they'd been tossed against the wall outside the door. Each step hurt but if he went slow, he could do it. She led the way upstairs, returning the glass to the kitchen and leading him to the back door. She stopped him with a hand on his chest and looked out through the window. Her hand lingered. When an automaton marched past she held up 10 fingers and counted them off three times before the next one marched by. They had thirty seconds to make it over the fence.

"How fast are you in that dress?" he asked her. She looked up at him in surprise and shook her head. Something heavy and horrible turned over in his chest.

"I will not leave you here Tessa, you are coming with me." She shook her head again, pain in her eyes. She held her arm up to the light of the lantern and pushed back her sleeves to show him a gold band around her wrist. She tilted her head up and pulled the collar down so he could see there was another around her throat. It looked tight enough to be uncomfortable. Without intending to, he ran a finger along it. It was warm though he couldn't say if it was magic or just that it lay close to her skin. She waited for the automaton to go by and then cracked the door open and showed him the band of runes carved into the step. It ran down and along the side of the house. A narrow band of carved stone that might as well have been the Great Wall. 

"We take them off," he said. She looked sad and gave her wrists a bit of a shake. It was a clear message, "You've tried and it didn't work."

To prove it, she changed. Her body shrinking down to almost child size. He had read about this. She'd explained what she was being trained to do in her letters but to see it was alarming. The wrist bands clattered off her hands to the floor but the one around her neck was still too small to be removed. A moment later, everything back in place, she returned to herself. He stared at her in awe. In the shadows of the kitchen her face wavered, like a reflection in a pond and her eyes looked at him again instead of the dark eyes of the child she had been. Not a Shadowhunter like he'd imagined.

"There's an answer," he said. She looked over her shoulder at the clock in the hall. It was early morning, 3am. After dawn it would be impossible for him to make the dash across the yard. He slammed a hand against the door frame and she jumped, taking a step away from him.

"I cannot leave you here," he said.

"Please Will," she said fighting against whatever magic made it so hard for her to speak. He took her face very gently in his hands and leaned his forehead against hers for just a moment. She tensed when he did it and he stepped away from her almost immediately.

"Help me search the house?" he asked. "I'll go before dawn." He wasn’t sure what he hoped to figure out while he searched but he had worked hard to get in here. He wasn’t leaving before he’d found something worth learning. And maybe with enough time, he could figure out an answer to the spell that kept her trapped.

Tessa showed him the office. He collected bits of correspondence and anything he could that looked like it might be useful and started shoving it into a bag. Then they tore the office apart. He got another one of those almost smiles as she helped him push folders and blueprints down off a bookshelf. Will knew it was childish but he liked destroying Mortmain's things. She hurled a paper weight made of gears at a painting and the glass of the frame shattered. That little smile said that she did too. The rest of the house was just a house.

"Why aren't there any of the metal monsters in here?" he asked her.

She opened the top two buttons of the blood streaked dress and pushed them over to show him a scar just below her collar bone that ran toward her shoulder.

"I thought they followed his orders," Will said. She drew a loop in the air with her finger. "There are always loop holes. Like 'don't kill her' doesn't mean 'don't hurt her.' What does he want with you?"

Her face shut down, all feelings draining out of it. It was the terrified mask she'd had when he'd first seen her with Mortmain's hand on her arm. Reluctantly, her face turned away from him, she held up a hand and showed him a mundane style wedding ring. The implications of that washed over him in a rush of rage that he had to close his eyes and clench his teeth to make it through without doing something violent.

"If I can't take you with me tonight, I will get you out of here. I promise you that," he said. The look she gave him was sad as though she appreciated the sentiment but he might as well have offered her the moon. It broke his heart that she believed so completely that rescue was impossible. "I will not abandon you to this, Tessa. I will not do it." Tears gathered in her eyes again. When he touched her face this time she leaned into his hand then stepped forward and he folded his arms around her.

She pulled back but only far enough that he could see her face, pointedly not looking at him, she said, "Go."

He swore softly in Welsh because she was right. If he didn't leave soon. He wouldn't be able to and every promise he made meant nothing if he was dead. "Can I write in your book? Will Jem ever see it?" She nodded and handed it to him. He wrote Jem a rambling letter that filled three pages. On another page he wrote. "I will not abandon you to this. Please don't give up hope." Then he handed it back to her. He gave her the stele as well.

"You are incredible," he said to her when they were back at the back door, "You saved my life tonight. Thank you.” He paused to touch her again, taking her by the shoulders and holding her close, “Thank you. Keep an eye on Jem for me. I will see you again."

"I know," she said. He stayed with her until the pain of speaking had passed. As the last guard passed, he squeezed her hand one last time and then stepped out into the night and left her alone in that house.

He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to forgive himself for it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know in the books, Tessa can't draw runes but it's an AU so too bad.


	4. Magic Lessons

* * *

Tessa Gray

April 26, 1881

* * *

 

Tessa had been blessedly sent back to the fortress. The long ride in the sealed carriage drawn by metal horses was as claustrophobic and unpleasant as it had ever been. She was bored and trapped inside her own thoughts in the near dark but that wasn't much different from any other day in her life. It was still a trip that made her thankful. Mortmain was staying behind in London. For what business, she was not told and she largely couldn't care. The lack of him was so profoundly relieving that she wasn't prepared to worry about the why.

Tucked in beneath the corset where it would be largely hidden by the shape of the stays and the layers of her dress was the stele that Will had given her. It was uncomfortable but it was a discomfort she held to in the stillness. It was a piece of solid hope. A chance to do or change something.

There was a single silent automaton in the carriage with her. It watched and would report on her behaviour when she arrived. She sat stiff and silent. She ate when food was provided and slept on the narrow bench when she was told it was time to sleep.

She was the picture of good behaviour.

She wasn't always. The bands she had shown Will were a reaction to the time she'd made it as far as Limehouse in a desperate bid for freedom. Past the guards, through the gate and into the city. Terrifying, dizzying and ultimately useless. Obstinance and destruction were met with violence and she'd given up on most of her urges to throw things or scream. Tantrums led to broken bones.

But she didn't speak. She had chosen which battle she would win and she didn't say a word.

When they arrived in the automaton lined entrance hall of Mortmain's stone fortress, Tessa stepped down to the floor as gracefully as her stiff knees could manage. She was met in that grand high ceilinged place by two warlocks in matching purple gowns. All her tentative hope threatened to crumble from under her. Just the sight of the two of them made her heart shrink down.

_You are incredible. I won’t abandon you to this. Hope comes from the strangest places. Don’t let him destroy you._

The words came in two voices now instead of just one. She inhaled deeply, the stele pushed into her skin below the corset. She folded her hands in front of her to have an excuse to run a finger along the marks on her palm. By the time the Dark Sisters had finished crossing the stone floor, her shoulders were squared, her back was straight and her gaze was level. They still terrified her but she had saved someone's life. Someone they, Mortmain and his ilk, wanted dead was alive because of something she'd done. She wrapped herself around that and waited for them to get close.

"You're late for your lessons, Theresa. Isn't she, sister?" Mrs. Dark said.

"She is," Mrs. Black answered.

Tessa thought of all the things that she could say to them. They kept up an easy back and forth chatter as they led her to a room of their choosing where a lesson in how to do magic would happen. The room that the sisters used was hotter than any other room in the fortress. Hot and damp and so very like the room where they had trained her to use the change. Six weeks of torturous lessons, a failed escape, a meeting with Mortmain that had left her skin crawling but had ended with a wedding regardless.

She stopped those thoughts in their tracks.

Inside the room, she sat on a wooden chair because all the upholstered furniture in the room was slightly damp. The sisters sat across the table from her and started to talk. They'd been teaching her summoning. They would put on object on the table and she was meant to summon it to her. When she mastered one object, there would be another or a greater distance or they would hide it. She was good at small objects but the heavier it was the harder she found the trick to perform. Feathers were easy. Drinking glasses were difficult. Anything larger than that was still nearly impossible.

They placed a book on the table. A new copy of a Wilkie Collins' novel she hadn't even known had been published. Books were heavy.

"Mrs. Dark was saying how much you missed your books," Mrs. Black said.

Tessa's lips twisted into the tiniest scowl. They'd burned all her books. She hadn't had many but they'd destroyed them after she'd done something particularly vexing. She’d lost what it was she had done in her memories. Perhaps it had been one of her escape attempts or the time they'd pushed her down and she'd come up swinging a poker from the fire and caught Mrs. Black in the shoulder. Whatever the cause, she hadn't had anything to read in months.

Mrs. Dark smiled at the scowl, it wasn't a nice smile, "If you can successfully summon this one, you may keep it."

Tessa considered not trying but she wanted the book and she had practiced while they weren't there to distract her. She suspected that they had taught her the most difficult version of this magic. Other warlocks in Mortmain's employ could summon entire automatons across the room. She might be young and she suspected she simply wasn't as strong as some of the others but it seemed impossible to do what they did using this spell. Like lifting a horse with a teaspoon. It simply couldn't be done no matter your strength.

She tried and failed and got a little slap to go with the disappointment. The sisters were in fine humour. She tried again and Mrs. Dark's gloating smile when she failed again brought up her temper. Her intention to behave, to stay unnoticed went out the window. Using not a summoning spell but a levitation spell that she was actually quite good at, she reached and yanked the woman's purple hat off. Then, still using magic, flung it at the fire. The silk flowers caught and burned. Tessa knew it was petty but she felt a little better.

The book followed the hat into the flames and by the time Tessa was tossed back into her room, she had bruises up and down her arms and a bleeding lip.

Finally alone she pulled out her stele and turned it in her hands. The room was a cave but it had plush furniture and paintings on the walls and a bedroom with a wardrobe full of dresses. It might have been home if the door didn't lock from the outside.

She smiled a little, rolling the stele between her fingers because she could unlock it now rather than relying on luck and jamming things into the locking mechanism while her automaton maid made her bed and cleared her dishes.  She could choose when she left the room.


	5. Prisoners

* * *

James Carstairs

April 28, 1881

* * *

 When Jem heard the tapping on the door something he hadn't known was tight loosened. She was back and she was well enough to force the lock on her door and make it to his. The cell he was in was at the back of the room but he knew she could hear him when he banged on the bars. In response she tried the lock. This lock was designed to hold an angry vampire if it needed to and she couldn't force it open. But sometimes, on very lucky days, the automatons who brought him the blood that kept him just on the right side of starvation wouldn't lock it properly. They weren't the intelligent ones and they couldn't problem solve.

Jem lived for the days when the locks didn't latch.

The demonic ones were kept on the other side of a magical barrier at the end of the hall except when Mortmain himself was escorting them down into this wing full of prisoners behind doors almost too heavy to be moved. They'd almost killed Tessa once just because she was there and had blood to be spilled. That was one of the incidents that kept Jem's chest tight every time she was away and sometimes she was away for weeks.

The lock turned and Jem schooled the disappointment out of his features before the door opened. He had been so sure that it was her, even without being able to see her, even without being able to smell her, he had been so sure. Maybe he had the day wrong. Maybe he'd misheard the tapping. Maybe it was just an automaton with one of the horrible meals. But when the door opened it was her and she smiled at him. It was a small smile but it was a real one. The smiles were far rarer than the days where he could actually see her. It didn't drop away as she crossed the long empty room to kneel where he sat against the corner of his cage. She walked carefully down the outside of the room, avoiding the field of shattered glass that led from the cage to the door that no one ever cleaned up. The glass glinted in the unnatural light of the place.

"Hello," he said to her as she tucked her skirt around her knees and touched his hand. That first moment of contact with her always startled him. She was warmer than anything else in his world. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched a living person who wasn’t this girl. It might have been Will the day the Institute had been attacked. That had been years ago. He wasn’t exactly sure how long.

"What are you so happy about?" he asked her. On anyone else it wouldn't have looked much like happiness, the little half smile that tugged at the corner of her lips but he'd never seen her smile for more than a flash at at time.

She pulled something out of her pocket and held it out for him. He reached through the bars to take it. A stele. Long and thin. A relic from a world he doubted he would ever even see again. That he could never be a part of again. It was just a stick in his hand now.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked and she took it back from him.

"Will," she said one of those very rare single words said through a compulsion spell so strong it made her shoulders shake just a little to get it out.

He stared at her. He had misheard her. He had misunderstood her but she smiled at him and then stood and went to the door at the far side of the cage and drew a rune on it. The door swung open. He was dumbfounded. It had been years since it had been opened. He stood slowly and walked towards her, stepping out of the cage for the first time since he'd been locked into it.

She gave him the warmest smile he'd ever seen on her face and then threw her arms around his neck. He staggered just a little in surprise before hugging her back. He lifted her and spun her around once with a laugh. He hadn't touched more than her hand since Mortmain had thought it entertaining to put his recalcitrant new wife in a cage with a half starved vampire and walk away. Jem still counted that he hadn't killed her that day as a sort of miracle.

She was warm and smelled like every good thing he’d ever had. Spring days and unusual spices and his favourite foods. His fangs slipped down now and he cut open his lip. He put her down and took a step back hastily. She followed him and wiped the blood off his lip herself.

"I should scare you," he said to her. She gave him an eloquent look that told him she thought that was a ridiculous suggestion. The first time he’d heard the tapping had been maybe a month after the automatons had dragged her away. It was a few more weeks before the door had been unlatched and she’d been able to push inside. Since that day when he’d been sure she was a figment of his imagination, she’d been less afraid of him than he was of himself. The days had been scattered but wonderful. He’d taught her runes and told her Shadowhunter stories and histories while she held his hand. She’d spelled out her name with a finger on the back of his hand.

She took his hand now and pulled him out of the room. The hallway was even higher than the room he'd been in but narrower. At one end it ended in a blunt stone wall at the other there was a corner where a brighter light was visible. The entire place was lit by sconces on the walls that seemed not to burn as just glow, like witchlight but greener, more wrong somehow. The open space by the corner had a solid barrier before it.

Tessa led the way to it. It was completely invisible, not even a sheen like glass might have. Jem leaned all his weight into it but it might as well have been stone. Then she took him down past his own open door to her's. She had a little sitting room with a fire in a grate. It wasn't quite homey but it was certainly a better dressed cage than his. There was a door beyond that that probably led to a bedroom.

She sat him down by the fire and pulled the second chair closer to him. Her fingers played over the back of his hand for a moment and she gave him a little bit of a smile. She help up her palm in an offer that she always made and he always accepted even though he hated himself just a little for it.

He ran his thumb over the very faint scarring on her palm and considered refusing the offer.

Then he considered asking for more.

He was pretty certain she'd lean her head back and let him pull her close and put his mouth to her throat. Her trust in him was implicit and he found it terrifying. He didn’t trust himself even a fraction as much as she did. He rolled that fantasy up into a ball and stuffed it down into the depths of his mind. He would not ask her for that.

She watched him with steady gray eyes as he brought her hand up to his mouth. He bit her as gently as it is possible to tear someone's skin open. She swallowed hard but didn't flinch. The look on her face was closer to desire than fear. He held her gaze as the blood started to flow. As she always did, she curled her fingers around his cheek and held him while he drank.

Part of the reason he preferred to do it like this rather than sinking his teeth into the artery at her wrist was that she'd hold him while he licked at the slower flowing blood. It took longer like this. He stroked her hair and her cheek with his free hand. Vampire saliva promoted healing and the flow started to slow as her skin healed into a new faint scar. He kept his mouth over her hand for a little longer than was really required.

There were no bars between them. She leaned toward him as he lowered her hand and held it between both of his. She was the only living thing he'd ever drank from and the experience always left him lethargic and content. He didn’t know if it that was normal for vampires or if it was something specific to her. It might have been something special in her blood or a side effect of the desire in his chest that had nothing to do blood and everything to do with the texture of her skin and the expression on her face.

He did something he'd never been able to before and reached for her. She climbed into his lap and settled against his chest, her head on his shoulder as he wrapped his arms around her. She smoothed the shirt he'd been wearing for longer than he cared to think about. The line left by her palm, even through fabric felt so vibrant that he thought it must be visible. He held her and murmured little soothing things into her hair as she leaned into him like she could meld herself to him.

She pulled away from him first and the smile was back again. For just a second she sat on his lap like a child, straight backed and alert. He rolled the desire to kiss her up with the other thoughts he couldn't think and smiled back. She stepped back into her own chair and he missed the warmth of her like an instant ache.

"Will," she said again still struggling with the word. With practice she could say things without it hurting so much. She could say his name without much more than a flinch. And then she handed him the little notebook where he'd drawn runes and Chinese characters for her. He opened it and she pulled back to watch him as he paged through their old conversations, passed back and forth through the bars of the cage on those days when the door hadn't locked properly. When he found the page where the handwriting changed he almost fell off his chair.

 

 

> _Dear James,_
> 
> _That your ability to keep me alive should extend so far beyond your own death is beyond comprehension. I felt you die, you bastard. Swear to me that you won't do it again before I find this cave you are in. Tessa tells me that it is a three days ride from London but that isn't a very good map._

 

It went on in a hasty hand to explain a little of what had happened since the attack in London and enough spotty details about his capture and escape to give Jem an idea of what Tessa had done. It ended with a promise that they'd see each other again and a request that Jem take care of Tessa.

"Did you really set his legs?" Jem asked her and she nodded grimacing a little. He was impressed. He’d had to reattach a dislocated shoulder once and that had been unpleasant enough.

"You saved his life," Jem said studying her. "You probably also saved their little resistance movement because there is no possibility that he isn't involved to his neck in every detail of it. Did he blame you for it?" Jem never said Mortmain's name to her. He avoided mentioning him at all. She shook her head looking away. Which probably meant that she'd gotten hurt even without being caught. When a control freak who lacked empathy was angry, everyone in his vicinity was a target. Tessa was usually in his vicinity. Jem regathered her hand, holding it and the little notebook with Will's words in both of his.

"Thank you," Jem said. "I don't care if you didn't do it for me. He is the only family I have left. He is a bit of a bastard sometimes but he is one of the few truly good people you will ever meet. The world is better if he's in it. And, Tess," he tightened his grip on her hands so that she would look at him, "When he shows up with that chance for you to leave. Promise me that you will take it." She frowned squeezing back with surprising strength in her fingers.

She took the book back, flipped it open to the page that read “I will not abandon you to this. Please don't give up hope” in Will’s handwriting and passed it back to him. He smiled. He smiled that Will would write this for a girl he’d never met before. It might have been the kindest thing he’d ever even heard of Will doing for someone outside the little group of them at the Institute and to do it so obviously instead of burying the kindness under everything else. And he smiled that she’d then pass it to him.

“Do not stay here if you have another option,” he said. Her expression was unreadable to him. “You wouldn’t be abandoning me. If you could do anything, anything to help the Shadowhunters left on the outside that is all I could ever ask. That’s my hope Tessa. You free and safe and Mortmain dead. That’s what I want most.”

She gave him a ghost smile more in acknowledgment than agreement. He reached out to cup her face and she leaned her chin into his hand. He wished, fervently, that they were anywhere else, that he wasn’t a monster, that he could finish pulling her towards him and put his lips to hers but instead he drew back and let his hand fall while she watched him, silent and inscrutable and maybe just a little disappointed.

 

* * *

 

The first day with the stele, they'd found empty rooms, trophy rooms, a room filled with uncatalogued or organized spell books in boxes. Tessa had dug through those for a long time before he'd pulled her on. Mortmain had arranged for her to have some sort of magic training and the books meant more to her than they did to him. They'd found the kitchen where her meals were cooked. It had two deactivated automatons standing with their backs to the door and they'd retreated quickly and locked it behind them. After that they were more careful opening the doors they found.

Lined up along the same side of the corridor where Jem's room sat were five other rooms. He didn't realize until later that Tessa had left them for last intentionally. At the first one, she paused, stele in hand and looked to him for reassurance. He had taken her hand and linked his fingers with hers and given her the best approximation of a reassuring face he could. Then she'd opened the door to a room identical to his.

It was not quiet inside. At the back of the room, in a cage just like his was a very old man. Ranting. He spoke loudly and constantly and it was almost unintelligible. Tessa pushed the door open but didn't advance. When the man caught her scent his teeth had extended and he had hissed and launched himself at the bars. Jem had heard vampires make that noise, seen them spring but it still made him step back in alarm. Tessa had shook her head and backed out of the room.

He remembered Mortmain saying, "She had a nasty run in with Aloysius earlier," on the day that he'd left her in the cage.

"We won't open the cage if he's like that," Jem whispered to her. She'd backed right into the hallway and stood with her back to the stone. "I'm going to go and talk to him." Her look of fear became concern. "A vampire will not attack another vampire out of hunger. He won't hurt me. Stay here."

On that day, they hadn't opened Aloysius's cage, nor on any of the days that came after. Jem didn't know if the transition had driven him mad or if it was something else but he was incapable of regaining enough coherency and control to be let out near anyone with a pulse. As Tessa was the only one who could use the stele, that left him in the cage.

They'd found three others, two werewolves and another vampire, locked into similar rooms. Kalyani Majumder had been with the Dublin Institute and lost her two children during the attack. She was a werewolf now and was one of those people that was instantly trustworthy. The second werewolf, Richard Mayburn, struggled with the rage that sometimes accompanied lycanthropy but if he was kept calm he was a likable if intense person. Jem kept himself between Richard and Tessa as unobtrusively as he could because when the rage took him, it was sudden. The final vampire was silent. Kalyani thought she might be Katherine Silverstein of the Cornwall Institute but she gave no reaction to the name, nor anything else. She sat in her cage and gave that vampiric hiss when any of the living walked by. It was more warning than anything else. When the door was unlocked, she didn't move.

They sat in Katherine's room. Aloysius was too loud and it seemed kind to give the silent woman a little bit of company. There was no furniture so they sat on the floor. Kalyani on one side of Tessa and Jem on the other while Richard prowled the room. Katherine ignored them. Tessa didn't actually touch him when they had an audience but she was always near enough that he could have put an arm around her if it was required or not an offense to propriety. That even here propriety was a concern was almost laughable but it seemed a way to hold onto something civilized. They were dirty and tattered and underfed. They had been changed from what they once were against their wills. They were trapped and there was no one coming to rescue them but at least they weren’t rude.

It was good to have company. They shared stories of the fall of the Institutes trying to find details that might be useful. Tessa obviously did not know what had happened. Jem wondered what version of the story Mortmain had told her. It probably didn’t include invasions and massacres over dinner.

“They did not kill everyone. They captured more than just me,” Richard said. “Where do you think the other prisoners are?”

No one had an answer for that. Tessa had not seen evidence of other prisoners during her time in other parts of the fortress. She was bombarded with questions that she couldn’t answer. Jem was a little surprised by the force of his protectiveness. They weren't a threat to her but the questions frustrated her. She retreated farther into her silence as she became overwhelmed by it all. She was less responsive when pushed and Richard in particular kept pushing her for answers she couldn't give. 

"Someone's coming!" Kal said hopping to her feet. Jem listened and heard what she had an instant later. What followed was a scramble. None of the cages were locked but at the very least, the doors needed to be closed. Kal dragged Richard back to his room with a growl of, "There is a time for attack, this is not it." Tessa had to close the final door on her own and Jem expected to see panic on her face when she shut him in but it wasn't there. Just determination and a little half smile when he met her eyes. He heard her footsteps retreating at a run.

With human hearing, he wouldn't have been able to hear much more. Nor would Kal have been able to hear the approaching footfalls with so much warning. He couldn't quite summon up 'grateful' as a reaction to that. The footsteps were the stomp of mechanical feet and under that the lighter tread of a man. Tessa must have been wrong that Mortmain had left.

It took everything he had to stay put as he heard the footsteps pass him. The door was locked. She was too smart to have left it unlocked. He wouldn't be strong enough to force it. Staying in the cage meant that if someone opened the door, she would not face more trouble. He had to trust that she had beat those footsteps back to her little suite of rooms.

He heard nothing else. It wasn't comforting.


	6. Plots and Plans

* * *

William Herondale

July 3, 1881

* * *

 

Will had spent the last three months watching carefully. Mortmain had left London a few weeks after Will had kicked him in the face and then escaped in the middle of the night. He had come back once in April for a few weeks but he'd come back alone. Wherever she was, she wasn't with him. Will had spent those three weeks in a foul temper that he refused to explain. He passed the spring in libraries digging through maps, looking for a cave system large enough to match up with Jem's description. Books had taught him more about England's geography than he had ever thought he might want to know and nothing had been right. He did it alone. In part because Sophie was right and he was terrible at asking for help. But also because the search for the fortress was secondary to the resistance. 

The resistance had plans for Tessa. Plans that require she remain unrescued so that she could feed them information. If she were willing to help, she'd be a gold mine of information and the conversation had lasted for days about all the things she could do for them. Will had painfully kept his mouth shut throughout the entire thing.

"They didn't see her, Soph," he said after the last of the official meetings had been wrapped up and they'd retreated back to the place they called the Children's Home. The children were all asleep, wrapped up in blankets and nightmares in crowded rooms above the kitchen where they sat. The only sound was a rhythmic tinkering coming from Henry's lab in the room behind them. Sophie was preparing food because Sophie never stopped working. If she wasn't managing spies, she was making bread or mending socks. Sophie turned big brown eyes on him and waited for him to continue.

"She was terrified. Determined, braver than half of them but terrified. The spy they want to turn her into will get her killed. Probably brutally," Will said.

"Do you think she'll say no?" Sophie.

"No," Will said putting his head down on his arms. He'd been helping Sophie cut vegetables, badly but helping and he still held the carrot he was supposed to be slicing. His voice was muffled by his arms, "She'll say yes. And then her blood will be on our hands. I don't want to do that to her. Put her in that position to choose between survival and helping."

"She's a Shadowhunter Mr. Herondale. She can make her own decisions. Sometimes it's better to go down fighting than never fight at all. There are worse things than dying," Sophie had said. She gave him a significant look and he scowled. Using Jem as a weapon in an argument was a thing Sophie never did but there it was. Sophie looked back at him blandly. 

Will wanted impossibilities. Removing Tessa from Mortmain would not be easy. She was either guarded or trapped by magics. Finding Jem was impossible without more details. Even just a direction would be helpful. For the time being, until he found something better, he was going along with the official plan. He spent much of the days before convincing himself it was right. He remembered the smile as she'd shoved books off that shelf and how well she knew the movements of the guards. She was already planning. They would just provide her the outside assistance. She would want to fight. He didn’t like it but he also couldn’t walk away from it.

While reporting in on what had happened, Will had left out some details. Such as the detail of the shape-changing and the detail about the letters he'd stolen from the investigation file and still kept hidden in a book in his room. She was assumed to be a Shadowhunter girl trapped by Mortmain. There had even been a round of speculation as to whether she was someone they knew. Will knew the answer to that but to drag out her secret would be to put her in greater danger. The resistance would fight to save a Shadowhunter who could wield a stolen stele. They might not do the same for a magic user who might not be human.

He'd also left out the detail about Jem because he couldn't speak about it yet. The relief that he wasn't gone. The horror of what he'd become. He hadn’t even be able to tell Henry and Sophie. It was personal and he was selfish and every time he opened his mouth to say, "Jem is not dead," he choked on some indescribable emotion. So, for the time being, it was a secret. 

Will often disagreed with the leaders of the Resistance. Rupert Blackthorn who was an excellent politician and a terrible strategist often served as the speaker during the meetings. Margaret Townsend was probably the closest thing they had to a leader and while Will liked her better than Rupert, she was ruthless. Margaret would not hesitate to set someone on fire to further the cause of ridding England of the automatons.

Against his best intentions, the person Will trusted most to plan and execute missions was Gideon Lightwood. Benedict Lightwood had been installed as a puppet leader of the London Institute about a year earlier and Gideon had arrived in the country with his father. It had seemed like the beginning of the end. A Shadowhunter in the Institute again. A clear line of communication to Idris. It was everything they had hoped for.

Until they had met with Gideon. He’d made contact with the resistance through a complicated series of messages passed to contacts in Spain and France before they were vetted and made their way back to London. Benedict was not a saviour. Gideon didn't know what it was that Mortmain had on Benedict, only that it was unshakable. Benedict was in the Magister's pocket far more deeply than Idris knew. But Gideon brought information and contact and seraph blades. Will had finally had to admit that he was also a good Shadowhunter. Smart, strategic, a good fighter. Will had never liked the Lightwoods but he couldn't quite extend that to Gideon. 

Much of this plan was Gideon’s. Based on Gideon’s information. It was complicated with distractions and multiple people doing different things at the exact right times and it had fallen to Will to make contact with Tessa.  That wasn't strictly true. It had fallen to Will because he had refused to let it fall to anyone else. His case had been good but his reasons had less to do with having already established trust and knowing his way around the grounds as it did with the pressing need to see her again and be sure that she wasn’t suffering for having helped him.

 

* * *

 

Running a path he'd ran before, moving fast and low, he climbed the side of the house. It had enough ornamental stone work to make climbing the walls a possibility. This was potentially a suicide mission but he'd done it three times before and made it. He hadn't gone inside before but Sophie’s contact had told them that there was no magic on the upper floor windows. The walls and the guards were supposed to keep the house secure. It was unnecessary to ward every window.

Sophie’s contact was a house maid who had been in Mortmain’s employ for over a year. The maid wasn't there that night, none of the servantry lived in the household for reasons they couldn't discover. She was a warlock with sympathies that lay very far from Mortmain. Not exactly in line with the Nephilim but close enough to make a deal based on the premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Not to be relied on, that one. Trustworthy enough, does what she says she'll do but she ain’t going to help us more than we help her. You’re going to have to pay to keep her there. Pay a lot,” Sophie had said when the warlock’s part in all this had been explained. Necessity trumped Sophie’s objections. Will suspected that if a Shadowhunter had made the objection first it would have been more carefully considered but since it was Sophie’s objection and Sophie was just a mundane, she’d been ignored.

Will used a rune, drawn with his new stele, to push open a dark window and slip into an unused bedroom. It was the most normal space imaginable. Carefully but unobtrusively furnished in pale colours he couldn't pick out in the dark. Will rummaged through drawers for a moment but the room was empty, a room for guests and nothing more.

Now came the difficult part. He knew where he needed to go. He could reasonably assume the house was asleep but he needed to get to Tessa's door without getting caught. He closed his eyes. Made a silent prayer and pushed the button on Henry's device. He tensed a little in case it blew up or started shrieking or in some other way ruined everything but it must have worked. A moment later an alarm went up. The magical lines around the house had been tripped. The device was just a signal, paired with another. When one activated so did the other. Shadowhunters outside were now leading the guards on a very long chase. He stood and listened at the door until he was sure that his distraction had been sufficiently distracting and then ducked into the hall moving fast and silent thanks to a collection of runes.

He had to use another rune on her door and stepped in without knocking. She was facing the window, hands tight on the sill, wearing a nightgown and a robe and looking thin and fragile. The sound of the door brought her whirling, her long braided hair whipping around her to settle on her shoulder. Will lay a finger to his lips and she stood agape, staring at him. At the window, beside her, he checked the street and the placement of the guards just as she’d been doing.

"The second distraction will be along soon," he said very softly. She was still staring. He allowed himself a stretched moment to return the look and take in all the details he hadn't been able to see in the dark of that first night. She was pale and thin, her eyes were a blue gray that called up memories of ocean mist. A small piece of brown hair had escaped the braid and fell beside her face. 

"How are you?" he asked once he'd been sure that the search was proceeding down the street, just as it was supposed to.

She gave him a little smile that was less ghostly but more baffled than the ones he'd seen on her before. She shrugged those narrow shoulders just a bit. Her eyebrows raised in a question. She put her hand on his arm, drawing him away from the window. This room was as devoid of personality as the one Will had broken into but it was lived in. There were hairpins and brushes on the dressing table and he could see dresses in the partially open wardrobe. It looked so innocuous. If the door hadn't been locked from the outside, it might seem like a lovely room.

"Don't look so surprised to see me," he mock chastised. In response she crossed her arms gave him a look of pouting disdain as though offended it had taken so long for him to return, playing right along. He stopped looking at her lips and said in a more serious voice, "I promised you that I wouldn't abandon you. This is just the beginning. I can't get you out tonight. Unless the bracelets are gone," he said but she held up a hand to show him the bands were still in place. 

He pulled out the little pack of letters. Officially, he was to deliver only the one with the four Cs stamped on the seal. The other two he had written himself. One was addressed to her, the other to Jem. This was not good enough. He played with them for a moment, running his fingers over the edges, before he handed them to her. The official one was on top.

"Wait," he whispered, laying his hand over hers before she could open them, "Know that you can say no. You have no obligation to do this. If you say no, I will make sure that we never," he emphasized the word, "Never, ask you again. I will not make your life harder than it is. Not even for this."

He was close to her and she met his intense stare. This was opposite of what he was to do. He was supposed to convince her to join them and put her life on down in the name of Clave and Consul. That is what he'd promised to do. But he wanted her to know that someone, somewhere was willing to put her first. Her nod was slow, her eyes very serious but he didn't think it was the expression of someone about to refuse to help. He freed her hands and stepped away so that she could open the letters herself.

Her expression lit up and she dropped the unopened letters on the bed and went to the wardrobe. A pocket was sewn into the bottom of one of the gowns and she knelt down and opened it to remove the little notebook. It was ingenious, all but invisible in the heavy skirts and if a maid were to pack the dresses for her, it would simply be folded into the suitcase.

"We're the world's oddest penpals," he said and she smiled again.

"I have a goal," he told her, holding the book tightly, "I am going to make you laugh."

She blinked at him a few times, confused but that smile tugged at a corner of her mouth.

"I expect it will take a while and I'll probably have to make good on my promise to get you out of here first but I will, someday, make you laugh," he said. Her smile that time reached her eyes. There was a fantastically beautiful girl hiding behind the misery wrapped around her. It dumbfounded him for a moment until she broke the spell by turning to retrieve her letters and open the official one. He kept his watch open as he paged through the book. He paused again over the answers Jem had written for her because they were so utterly Jem. They were better proof than anything else that he was out there. Other people didn't have a sense of humour like that. Quiet, clever, a little strange. Jokes that other people didn't get. 

But he found what she had intended for him, a letter written to him directly that included the phrase, "only you would tell your dead parabatai that he was a bastard" and a promise to try to stay alive. It also included as much of an explanation of the fortress as he had seen: large stone rooms linked by a high ceilinged hallway, magical barriers, hot springs bringing in water, magic lighting and prisoners.

Will read down over the explanation twice. Tessa had used her borrowed stele to open every door she could find. There were five other Shadowhunters who had been changed, one representing each of the fallen Institutes. Three vampires, two werewolves. There had also been trophy cabinets full of things stolen from those same Institutes. Will reread it twice and then checked the clock. He needed to go. Soon.

"You don't need to tell me now," Will said coming to sit beside Tessa on the bed. She'd only read the official letter. The other two still lay sealed. She held it tightly in both hands like it were a lifeline. 

"Think about it. The instructions are on that page. Do not put yourself in danger,” he waited for her nod before he said, “Ask me for something.” She cocked her head at him. The words escaped before he had thought them through but as soon as he said it he realized he meant it.

"I want to bring you something. Something that has nothing to do with monsters or metal men or secret resistance movements. I'll bring you chocolates or a tin whistle or a kitten," he said.

She shook her head. Now that little smile reached her eyes.

"What makes you happy?" he asked her more serious now. She took a moment to think hard before she got up, stepped around him and walked to an empty bookshelf by the door and ran a finger along the shelf.

"You want a book?" he asked grinning, he should have guessed that from her letters, "Any special requests?" She started to open her mouth and held out her spread hands to show him what a ridiculous question that was. She couldn't tell him what she wanted to read. Jem's note had said it was a compulsion spell but he didn't know more than that because she could neither write nor speak.

"Novel, poetry, or history?" he asked. She held up two fingers, the second one.

"Poetry," he said considering what he could find for her. He named off some poets and she gave him exaggerated expressions to show him which ones she liked or didn't like. "Someday, I want to hear the opinion that goes with that face," he told her after mentioning Tennyson. 

"Thank you," she breathed out with that painful shudder that always accompanied her words. He wasn't sure if the thank you was for the book or for coming back. Had she doubted that he would? He was out of time if he didn’t want to end up in the dungeon again. He pulled out his little signal device but it hadn’t activated yet. He needed to be out the window and back down to the lawn before it did. 

"Until the next time," he said and he pressed a kiss to her hand before hurrying to the door. He looked back at her once, she held the letters in her hands and had just the tiniest of smiles on her lips. Their eyes met and her smile widened and then he shut the door and she was gone again. He thought he might be able to forgive himself for leaving her this time.


	7. The Party

* * *

Tessa Gray

March 24, 1882

* * *

 

 

Mortmain's party was a stage show and it set every one of her nerves on edge. The warlocks who swirled around her in brightly coloured clothing and brightly coloured skins and all sorts of extra details like horns and tails. Some of them were quite beautiful while others were so sinister she had to resist the urge to shy away from them when they came near. The same set of horns on one man looked striking, on another like a weapon.

Tessa had so few strangers in her life that even just the number of people made her uncomfortable. A human maid had done her hair, she'd been given a new dress and a pair of new shoes. Brushed, washed and put out on display like an exotic pet. Mrs. Dark stood at her elbow and just her presence was enough of a threat that Tessa had performed her tricks.

There'd been the cajoling and the the cheering from the crowd to try and convince her to do a spell with an incantation. That she had refused. There would be hell to pay for the refusal later but she was already so frazzled, she didn't think she could manage even a single word without crumbling. And besides, there was always hell to pay for one thing or another.

That had all been before they'd been shown into the main room. She had been led into the room on the arm of a warlock who looked like a young man but who claimed to have visited Carthage during its golden age. She'd been looking at him and hadn't immediately seen what else was in the great domed room. She caught sight of Katherine first. The vampire woman who never spoke was standing today but her face was that same empty anger.

The cages had been brought up here. Luckily she wasn't the only one swinging their heads around to look at everything. Kal stood with the bearing of a queen. Richard had transformed, something she hadn't seen before but somehow she still knew that it was him. Aloysius was muttering rather than ranting. She caught Jem's eye and her heart almost stopped. Nothing good would happen here. They were all uninjured but very wary. Jem watched her while pretending not to.

Her Carthaginian escort was telling her about how Mortmain had had the Shadowhunters changed to teach them a lesson about the hubris of believing themselves better than everyone else. She had heard that story before. The evils of the Nephilim were a favoured topic in all her lessons. The magic lessons with the Dark Sisters and the so-called history lessons of Mortmain himself were full of reminders that this war was right and just and necessary.

"I don't understand why he'd choose a skinny mute thing like you," the next person to take her arm and pull her on a turn around the room said. The woman was a warlock with webbed fingers and not-quite blue skin. She spent nearly a quarter of an hour telling Tessa all the reasons that she was an unreasonable choice for the Magister to select as a wife. She wanted to scream at the girl that if she was so interested, she was welcome to the job, but she couldn't.

She caught Kal's eye as she passed her prison and of all the things, the woman gave her an tiny encouraging smile. Tessa's heart hurt a little. I don't deserve that kindness, she wanted to say. I am the reason you are in that cage. I am the reason that your children are gone. I am the reason.

But she couldn't tell Kal all the reasons that she was to be hated and so the woman kept offering her kindnesses she didn't deserve. Brushing out her hair during those days when she could open the doors, telling her stories of her children and visiting her grandparents in India and the best places to visit in Ireland. Kal would elbow her in the ribs and point it out each time she caught Jem watching.

She was rescued from the tirade of her own incompetence by another warlock. A tall narrow woman with lizard's eyes and a fringe of horns over her forehead gave the nattering girl a look and she'd vanished as though by magic.

"Marcelline," she'd introduced herself before steering Tessa toward Jem. "Silver Boy's been watching you. I thought he might be nicer to me if I brought him something pretty to look at."

Jem gave Tessa the tiniest of smiles and her inability to open the cage and pull him out of this entire place made her chest contract with the guilt. I am the reason and I can't even do something about this. He addressed Marcelline by name and Tessa startled a little at that. It was hard to remember sometimes that there had been a life for any of them outside of this.

"James here is one of Charlotte's little collection of orphan Shadowhunter babies. Last I saw him he wasn't nearly so tall nor so dead and his hair was still mostly black. He was a cute child, attached at the hip with that other one, the pretty rude one," she waved her hand as though trying to place the name. Tessa looked at Jem, trying to picture him as a child and not let the knowledge that he had been an orphan even before the war make her tear up.

"Will," Jem said.

"Is he dead?" Marcelline asked.

"I don't believe so," Jem told her. "He's off deviling your host's plans, I'm quite sure."

"As you would be if you weren't here," she said smiling fondly as one might to learn that an old friend had taken up an interesting new pastime. They spoke as though they were at a normal dinner party and one wasn't trapped behind a cage door. Her imagination called up an image of him in proper evening wear with his hair cut and brushed. He was beautiful when he was disheveled and caged. He must have been something glorious once. He had been a gentleman, someone who wouldn't have looked twice at someone like her.

There was a sound of rage from somewhere else in the room and Tessa spun around looking for the source. The next noise wasn't anger, it was pain and it wasn't coming from a human mouth. Richard. Richard who had sat in wolf form just to try and irritate the guests. She took a step forward and Marcelline tightened her hold.

"The entertainments at a party like this aren't often very kind," she said and Tessa craned her neck to get a better look at what was happening and then cast a look back at Jem who had disappeared behind a quiet, serious mask. Marcelline hauled her away in a way that managed to make it look like she wasn't being dragged towards the punch bowl.

"Do you understand that you are important?" she asked and Tessa looked at her in surprise. "You are important. There is no stopping a man like your husband," the shock of Richard being hurt had damaged her ability to keep her face in check and she grimaced at the word, "And yet, you stand in his way. Don't you dare give him the means to break you."

Tessa turned all her attention back to Marcelline. The means to break you. She remembered every threat issued against her brother and the things she'd endured, the things she'd worked hard to learn because it might have helped him. Helpless, she glanced back at Jem again. He was still outside the game that the crueler guests were playing. What would she agree to if it would save him? How had Marcelline even noticed. She played back over everything she'd done that evening. Every time she'd looked to Jem or to Kal or to Richard, even to Katherine. Had she done it too many times, had she made some other error?

"It isn't obvious. I watch very, very carefully and I've seen that boy before. But if you do something stupid, it will be obvious. Something stupid like trying to stop this. Be distressed but you will stay with me," she said.

"Why?" Tessa pushed the word out around the stabbing pain under her ribs.

"Because if you fall, the whole house of cards comes down with you, darling," Marcelline said holding her arm tightly. "You're still very young and you haven't learned yet that sometimes suffering is necessary. You can't be expected to save them all."

 

* * *

 

Tessa didn't open doors when she knew that Mortmain was in residence. He rarely came down to visit after dark but the risks were too great. She stood in front of the door to her little set of rooms and twisted the stele in her hands and stared at the heavy slab of wood and metal as though it could tell her whether or not she was making the right choice.

"You can't be expected to save them all," played over in her head and maybe it was true but there wasn't anyone else who was in a position to so much as try. And someone, she hadn't seen who, had left a silver knife in Kal's leg. She drew the rune and pushed the door open just a fraction and stood listening to the silence in the corridor. She gathered the remains of the pillow case she had shredded and stepped out into the hallway.

Kal lay curled on her side and there was blood on the ground. Anger rolled through Tessa but that was about as helpful as tears would be and so she locked it down with the sorrow and the horror and crossed the room. Kal woke slowly and Tessa took her hand with a wave of relief that almost pulled the tears out. The knife was on the ground, she'd pulled it out herself. Silver dust, which is what they had been doing to Richard as well, had left a stippling of burn marks across her cheeks and down her arms but she was conscious.

Kal had to give her instructions on how to wash and bind a wound and she had to go back for water. In the end she wasn't bleeding any longer and Tessa was able to breathe. Kal pet her hair in such a motherly gesture that Tessa almost fell apart again. She wrapped her in a woolen shawl and left her water to drink. She'd have to come back early to get the things back before anyone noticed but for at least a little while she would have some sort of comfort.

In Katherine’s room, she did something she'd never done. She offered her wrist. During Mortmain's campaign of giving her reasons to hate Shadowhunters, she'd been put in a room with Katherine as well as the episode with Aloysius and that first time with Jem. Katherine had bit down on her arm and drank and then pulled away. It had been clinical and unpleasant for everyone involved. Katherine turned her down this time though the skin around her eyes was tight with hunger. She visited Richard who was not as severely injured as Kal had been but much less calm. Her nerves couldn't take the yelling and as she sat in the hall outside his door, she felt like a monster for closing the door again.

She knew that once she'd seen Jem, she wouldn't be able to leave him and she'd left him until last for that very reason. When she pushed open the door, he leapt to his feet and grabbed the bars. His skin was too tight, his bones stuck out sharply. She had thought him skeletal and terrifying the first time she’d seen him this hungry. She couldn’t see it any more. She had been afraid of him once but that fear was long gone now.

"Go back to your room, it isn't safe," he said and she shook her head. Crossing the hellish mess in the middle of the room to take his hand and push his sleeve up. They had run holy water down his arms until the skin had peeled back and though Marcelline had promised her that it would heal, she needed the proof. His skin was cool and smooth and perfect beneath her fingers. The patterns left behind by old runes in another life were still there but the welts and the split skin were gone.

Finally, she did start to cry. Silent tears but tears nonetheless.

"It will heal," he said. "You don't need to worry about me. Go back, Tess, don't get caught on my account."

He was right. Getting caught in here would be disastrous but her hands were shaking and she opened the cage door instead.

I can't loose you. I can't let you die in here. I would do anything if it would have stopped them from hurting you. Anything.

She couldn't get that many words out so she reached out for him and he pulled her into the circle of his arms and she whispered his name into his chest. He wasn't talking. He didn't when he was hungry enough that scents were bothering him. She could remember the changes in his expression that first day when he'd taken a breath to speak and gotten a mouthful of the smell of blood as well. He'd pressed his mouth to her and then he'd apologized and untied her. She couldn't remember another time that anyone had apologized to her after something like that and he hadn't even been the one to hurt her.

This boy, thin and ill and eerily beautiful, was Mortmain's monster. The thing he needed to destroy. When he’d stepped back after untying her, her blood had still been on his lips. It had been the first time she'd looked a Shadowhunter in the eye. These were the people who had killed her brother and torn Mortmain's parents to pieces. She'd looked into his strange silver eyes and the twist of genuine concern in his face and had known that it wasn't the entire story. It wasn't a surprise. Mortmain lied. She knew that. But the way he'd pressed his lips into an angry line when he'd looked at the bruises on her arms that day had been a confirmation of her suspicions.

"Jem," she said again because it was one of the few words she could say without nausea washing through her. She tilted his face down to find those eyes and traced his features with her finger tips. He was an orphan. Will was the only family had. He'd been hurt before. He had made some sarcastic little comment about it not being as bad as he'd had before when his skin had been breaking apart in crackling ribbons. It might have been bravado but it seemed like a truth to her. He was a mystery in so many ways but those eyes got her through the dark.

With her arms around his neck, she pulled him down so his face brushed against her neck. So tall. So tall and so thin. The ridges of his spine were right there under her fingers as she slid her hand up the back of his neck and into his hair. He shuddered and bent his head so the brush of lips became the cool pressure of his forehead.

This wasn't what she wanted to offer him but it was exactly what she needed. He was here and he was as close to safe as he could be. She hummed to him. An old song that her aunt had sung to her when she was very young. The words were lost in her memory but the melody was all that mattered. Will had talked about his music. He'd made music once. He’d lost so much and it wasn’t fair.

"Go back, Tessa," he said softly and she shook her head and held him a little tighter. There were many types of comfort and he was hers. He would never have looked at her twice if they'd met in their lives before the world had gone to hell but sometimes she believed that he found her comforting as well. Most of the time, he was a protector, defensive and honest but just a little distant. Sometimes he pulled her close like this. Sometimes he told her stories in a whisper that weren't meant for anyone else. Sometimes she could imagine being good enough for someone like him.

"Stop offering me that," he whispered against her neck.

"Why?" she breathed the word out, softer than speech because it hurt less like that and maybe because being this close to him did strange things to her ability to breathe.

"Because I want it too much. I won't hurt you like that," he said. Still trying to protect her, even half starved from the effort of healing.

"Please," she whispered. She tried to put all the rest of what she wanted to say into that one word. Please let me do something for you. Let me give you back some fraction of what you've given me. I can't save you. I want to but I can't. Let me offer you the one thing that I have that you need. I trust you.

His lips brushed against her throat and something low in her stomach warmed. She leaned closer to him and tightened her hold. She wanted to say something comforting, something to tell him that this was right and good.

The first time he'd bit her, he'd never done it before. It had hurt and then the magic had began and it hadn't. Now he had all the self control of months of practice. The pressure on her pulse pushed her heart to beat faster. When he broke the skin it was a sharp, fast pain that was followed by a stroke of his tongue over the punctured skin that she felt to her toes. The soft noise she made wasn't pain. One of his hands steadied her head and the fingers wove through the hair along the back of her neck. The other was around her waist, holding her close.

Even before the unnatural bliss of the bite started, she was swimming in sensation. Her whole world narrowed down to the places he was touching her. His hair brushed her shoulder as he drank. She could feel him swallow as she held onto his neck. It was hard to say whether she was trying to hold herself up or hold him close.

He took too much. She came back to herself light headed and lethargic and surrounded by him. He'd sat down against the cave wall and held her close. She cuddled her face into his the crook of his shoulder. There was no more safety. She'd accepted that. She had accepted that she would wake up to find Mortmain standing over her while she slept. She'd accepted that anything could result in broken bones and whip scars and she would never be able to predict when it was coming. She had accepted that she would probably never get to walk through Central Park again. There was no more safety but there was this moment and it felt a lot like being safe and happy had.

"Someday, I'll take you out somewhere nice, a carriage ride in the park or a museum," he said and she couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. She couldn't answer him either way so she ran his too-soft hair between her fingers and tried to memorize the feel of him because she was going to have to leave him again soon. 


	8. A Visitor

* * *

William Herondale

April 3, 1882

* * *

 

Will adjusted the girl's fingers, again. They stood in what would have been the parlour of the of the Children's House if it hadn't been converted into a makeshift battle school. Mattie was eleven. Narrow bones, brown skin, wide black eyes and a fierce determination that didn't quite outbalance her preadolescent clumsiness. Her brother, Akash, was fifteen but most of the rest of the description was just as applicable to him though he dropped knives less often. Both of them had been born in Dublin though their grandparents had come through the Mumbai Institute decades before. Mattie was actually short for Madhuri not Matilda or Martha.

"Pull your hand all the way back to your ear and remember, you throw with your entire body, not just your hand," Will reminded her and then stepped back. He exchanged a brief look with Akash who held up a stele and smiled one of those smiles one reserved for mocking little sisters. If she sliced her hand open again, they could fix it. Mattie had scared fingers from all the bandaged cuts she'd endured before she'd been old enough for her first runes and iratzes. Rather than held in ceremony in the Institute or the Silent City, the first runings of most of these children had happened in this room.

The knife hit, off center but it hit the target. The room cheered. Everyone knew everyone else's struggles. They cheered when Peter Wayland made the balance runs without wavering and Rachel Penhallow aced a recitation in any demon language. The children were more closely tied to each other than they were to anyone else.

"There you are," Sophie said coming into the room. Will squeezed Mattie's shoulder to tell her that she'd done well and then turned to Sophie. "I shoulda known to just follow the noise."

"Mattie just aced three in a row," Will said. He was proud of her. She must have been working on it outside of formal lessons because the last time he’d had her try it had been a rather poor showing.

"Congratulations," Sophie said with a genuine smile at the girl who stood a little straighter. She tilted her head at Will so that he would follow her.

He gave a set of hasty instructions to Akash and Rachel so they could take over the lesson and then hurried after Sophie who waited in the hallway.

"You like those children," Sophie declared.

"I hate all children," Will said but he was smiling. "Awful, loud, sticky things."

Sophie ignored him, "We've got a visitor," she said and the tone of her voice made visitor sound like an insult.

"And?" Will asked.

"She wants to talk to someone from the London Institute," Sophie said. "I don't count and it isn't fair to send Henry to talk about Before. So you're it. She's at the safe house by the docks."

"Who is this she?" Will asked. He knew who he wanted it to be but they hadn't heard from her since her last message had been passed through the maid at the Chiswick house three weeks earlier.

"I don't know, no one tells me," Sophie said and then stopped before she let her anger get the better of her.

"And then they expect you to manage every Downworld spy," Will finished for her. "Come along with me. Rachel and Akash are old enough to manage the sticky children without us."

* * *

Will recognized the visitor as soon as they entered the safe house. The building was mostly empty space and mildew but there was one well furnished room - with three exits - at the back of the house. The woman waiting there was simultaneously beautiful and reptilian. Her flat lizard's eyes in a pretty human face blinked slowly before she smiled to show inhuman teeth. Everything about her was tailored and elegant. Even the horns that fanned up off her forehead like a lizard's frill managed to be elegant.

"I knew if I kept picking up rocks, I'd find you under one," she said to Will in perfect accented English.

"Marcelline," Will said with a little bow that wasn't quite as courtly as it should have been. The last time he’d seen her he’d been 13 and had called her Lizard Bitch. Charlotte had threatened to throw him out of a window. "How is the warlock market business down in Cannes this time of year?" He said this for Sophie's benefit. Marcelline hadn’t been in London in 6 years, before Sophie had joined the Institute.

"It is well but I have heard that there is a British industrialist who thinks he could do a better job with metal men and violent murders. So I thought I'd come have a look at how London is faring," she said settling back onto the arm chair she had been sitting in when they'd entered. She sat across from Rupert Blackthorn who had a round, handsome face twisted into a scowl. Will had the impression that Marcelline had been stonewalling him.

"We haven't enjoyed it thus far,” Will said.

"No, it would seem not." Marcelline said. "I was speaking to your little silver friend a few weeks ago. He's much taller and much deader than he was the last I saw him. He told me you were off, 'deviling' Mortmain's plans and I thought you might like a little extra support in that."

"Jem?" Will asked sitting down on the sofa across from her. Jem had been writing Tessa's responses to the letters they sent her. It was no longer a secret that he and the other captives were there though they hadn't been named. The most recent message to be delivered had asked for names but a response hadn’t come yet. The lack of knowledge. All the surprises and secrets were slowly driving Will mad. He would have given everything he had for any piece of evidence that might point to a location.

Tracking Mortmain’s carriages had proved fruitless. They’d stop off outside the city and then never leave the inn. Or the carriage would vanish. It was a glamour of some kind but even the few warlocks willing to work with the Nephilim couldn’t decipher the spells that were at play. When there weren’t spells there were road blocks. It was infuriating and inconsistent. Mortmain went in many different directions. He went to many different places. There was no way of know when he left if he was headed for York or Cardiff or the restaurant up the street.

As they settled in to see what sort of information Marcelline might offer, Sophie went to stand to the side as befitted a servant's training. Will caught her sleeve and physically pulled her down onto the seat beside him as she tried to step away. He shot her a look that he hoped said, "You deserve to be here," but was probably more hostile than that. He needed to get better at being kind. She stayed seated because it would now be more rude to get up.

"Mortmain has a collection of Downworlders who used to be Shadowhunters," Marcelline said. "He invited a group of Warlocks from the continent up to his lovely giant cave.” Will opened his mouth but she waved off the inevitable question, “And no, I don't know where exactly it was someplace south of here. He houses his army there and it is an army if you had any doubts. Alors, I was saying Downworld Shadowhunters. He thinks they are quite funny. Invites the guests to throw silver dust at the werewolves and holy water at vampires."

"And because you have such a warm heart, you decided that you would come help us defeat him?" Rupert asked with an appreciable amount of sarcasm which almost made Will smile at him. Almost.

"Do you know what I did before I started La Miroir, Mr. Blackthorn?" Marcelline gave him a beat before she pushed on and said, "I was a whore. I was a very good whore. Eventually I ran my very own brothel. That was called La Miroir too before I took the name for the market. I have seen many powerful men who think they can do whatever they please. And do you know how powerful men treat whores?" Rupert shifted as though unsure how to answer this so she continued, "Like rubbish that bruises. Mortmain is that sort of man."

"That much is obvious. He does not even object to killing children," Will said. "But he is not without allies. People follow power because they want to be rich and powerful as well. I still don't understand why you would want to choose sides against him. You like power Marcelline. You've never been secretive about it."

"I have limits. And I care about my own people. There are very few female warlocks who survive past 200 or 300 years old. We die. Violently. Often in brothels because whores who don't ever get pregnant or old are lucrative. Mortmain likes to pretend that he is on the side of Downworld but the rumours are that his army was built on the corpses of entire werewolf packs. And he has used a Martrivinculum spell on a warlock girl and her determination to hold onto herself is currently the only thing standing between him and immortality. She's another girl, like so many before her, caught by a powerful man who treats her as garbage. I will build my power on the bodies of enemies and the ruined fortunes of those who cross me," her smile wasn't kind, "But I do not want Mortmain in my country which means stopping him while he is still in yours."

"Because he is unkind to a warlock girl and some werewolves?" Rupert asked.

“If that is what you call unkindness I’d hate to see what real evil would looks like,” Sophie muttered but Marcelline was already talking over her. Will had remembered her as energetic but she was passionately warmed to her theme now. Gesturing and speaking with intensity. She could incite rebellion in the right audience.

"And you aren't trying to stop him because he was unkind to Shadowhunters? Is it so different?" Marcelline asked. "Don't tell me you're doing it for the greater good. No one lives in filth like this," she waved an elegant sharp clawed hand at the room, "For four years because of ideals. You do it for honour and revenge."

"What's a Martivin..." Sophie started, "The spell, to make him immortal, what's that?"

"Ritual marriage," Marcelline told her. "Allows you to tie two people together so they can share power but it isn't equal. They never are. Someone must be subjugated."

"Not a very rosy view of marriage," Will said.

"You're adorable when you are naive," Marcelline said, "Marriage isn't rosy. It's all about subjugation. But when you add in magic: it's literal subjugation. The girl will lose her sense of self and her her free will and he will gain immortality and magics that he should not be allowed to touch."

"How is she stopping it?" Sophie asked.

"By not saying her marriage vows," Marcelline said. "Very simple. Very effective until one day he beats her hard enough that she gives up the fight. Then we are all in trouble. More trouble. You are all in trouble now,” she waved her hands at them, rings on her fingers flashing, “I have a ticket to cross the Channel on Tuesday and go back to a sane country. I would appreciate it if it remained that way. Mortmain will be spending the summer in Europe, finishing out his little diplomatic mission. I will be sending you all the details about those movements and anything else interesting that comes out of France. I might even send you a decent bottle of wine if I am feeling kind. I have had nothing but swill since arriving on this horrid island."

"And we should trust you?" Will asked her.

"Take any and everything you hear with a grain of salt, pretty boy," Marcelline told him. "But I trust me and I am more often correct than most people. You should trust me as well."

She stood and smoothed her skirt. The plain gray dress was as carefully cut and styled as everything else she wore. A gray hat was affixed to her hair behind her horns and she pulled back on her gloves.

"How is Jem?" Will asked standing with her.

"Sarcastic. He always seemed like the nice one when you were children and yet here we are, him sneering and you not calling me lizard bitch even one time. He needs a new suit and he is undead but as much as one in those conditions can be well, he is," she said.

"Are you sugar coating for me?" Will asked.

"He is not dead. He is not broken. He has a very pretty girl who is very worried about him and he will heal. That is about as well as can be expected, no?" she said.

Will pressed his lips into a line and agreed.

"Good luck. Here are directions on how to contact me. You may not contact me directly. If you show up at my doorstep, I will not treat you as friends. I want Mortmain to stay away from my people but I would like to survive to see the world without him in it," she handed Will a slip of paper which he passed to Sophie. If he were thinking politically he would have passed it to Rupert first but Sophie was the one who would end up organizing those details so he gave it to her. Once Marcelline was out the door, Rupert took the letter back from Sophie and read it himself.

"That's complicated," he said.

"It's simpler than scheduling a meeting with Gideon Lightwood and he lives in the city," Sophie said holding out her hand. Rupert put the paper back in it and it disappeared into the pocket of her very practical dress.

* * *

Later, once Rupert had gone, Sophie said, "The warlock girl she met is the Shadowhunter girl that you did. The stories are too similar for there to be two of her."

"Yes," Will said.

"Is she a Shadowhunter or a Warlock?" Sophie asked.

"I have no idea," Will said. "She can do magic. I've seen it. She can use a stele. She looks human but I haven't checked for a warlock mark."

"Why didn't you mention that?" Sophie said.

"Rupert would barely look Marcelline in the eye and she is an old friend of the London Conclave as well as an ally," Will said.

"So you lied so that they would help her," Sophie said.

"I don't know that she isn't a Shadowhunter," Will said. "It is only that I didn't mention the magic. Do you think I should tell them?"

"No," she said glaring a little at the spot that Rupert had vacated. "Let's go check those maps of yours again. Jem is underground south of us. That's better than we knew before."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not a useful or helpful note to you my dear readers. I apologize. 
> 
> Marcelline is just my favourite thing to write. She was supposed to be a throw away character - she only exists to tell us that Mortmain is making moves to extend his power over the rest of Europe - but then she goes off on the most cynical girl-power rant I have ever written. 
> 
> And now she is my favourite OC out of every piece of fanfic I have ever written.
> 
> But hey! Two chapters in one day so that makes up for it a little bit, right?


	9. A Long Summer

* * *

James Carstairs

September 18, 1882

* * *

 

In the summer of 1882, Axel Mortmain declared that he wished for peace and journeyed to Idris to meet with the Shadowhunters to try and find a place in the Accords for his new creatures. Jem hoped that the Consul and the Council would be able to see a deal with the devil before they signed anything. But then, if Mortmain could guarantee that the rest of the world would be safe from the automatons, if they believed him when he promised it, they might make that deal.

The side effect of that trip was that Tessa had been left in the fortress for five months. Mortmain wasn't expected back until October. There was little the group of them could do during the interim but the freedom was worth something. The doors were open longer and more often and the time away from Mortmain had brought about a change in Tessa.

She was still silent but no longer ghostly. She could have entire conversations in expressions and gestures. Alive. It was a strange adjective to use but it was the best one that Jem could come up with to explain the change. He and Kalyani had started trying to put her through a modified version of Shadowhunter training and she had taken to it with enthusiasm. She was a fast learner and paid careful attention. They taught her to fight using hairbrushes and cutlery as stand in weaponry and she sometimes even laughed after parrying a strike with a butter knife.

Then there was the magic. Kal and Richard were pretty sure that she was a Shadowhunter since she could use a stele but she had a powerful well of magic to draw on as well. Mortmain seemed to think this was an important thing and once a week she disappeared to some other part of the fortress for a magic lesson. She always returned from it in a dark temper and Jem longed to know what happened. She waved him off when he tried to get her to explain it. They’d gotten quite good at discussing difficult concepts without her needing to speak. He just needed to ask the right questions. Stories about her life. Things that she’d seen since coming to London.

The time also gave them the ability to explore the caverns more thoroughly. During their explorations of the rooms they had found boxes of spell books and she was trying to teach herself things out of them too.

She would sit beside him and work on her spells with a little frown line of concentration between her brows. He'd set up little things for her to try to move or simply provide moral support when her torrent of sparks fizzled over and over again before roaring to life in a rush that made them both jump. It was something that she wasn't as comfortable doing with the others and no one else had seen her change. Mortmain had said once, at a hellish party he hosted for warlocks in the spring that she had a special power but hadn’t explained it. She'd only shown Jem once what it meant. The transformation didn’t change her ability to speak but it had been an incredible thing to see.

"When I first met you," he said during one of those practice sessions, "You were scared of everything," she frowned as though she took offense to that and he had touched her arm in apology and continued, "You didn't look directly at anything. Not at me, not even at the notebook. It was as though you had given up on everything but survival," he said.

She shifted uncomfortably, the spell forgotten. He was right and it broke his heart a little.

"And yet, here you are, strong and determined, planning and fighting," he said reaching for her hands and she gave them to him. "It's impressive, that's all."

The compliment meant more to her than he expected it to. She smiled and it wasn't ghostly or fleeting. It might have been the start of the change but it happened so slowly that he couldn’t quite say when it had started. Jem had liked her since she'd leveled her gaze at him while tied to the cage wall on that first day. What he couldn't say was when that had transformed into this feeling that shot through him when she so much as glanced at him.

It had been a long summer and as the weeks ticked down knowing that Mortmain was returning had cast a pall over all of them. Richard had been exploring crevices, finding dead end halls or empty rooms or sheer drops that couldn't be scaled even with a werewolf's claws. Kal read spell books and sketched and tried to get Katherine to speak. As the only one whose scent didn't drive Aloysius mad it had become Jem's responsibility to spend at least a little time with the old man. He didn't enjoy it. Even at his most lucid, Aloysius's favourite topics of conversation were his tragic family history and his adventures collecting spoils before the Accords had been signed.

Jem stomached the stories about butchering warlocks and removing the wings from faeries because the cruelty of leaving the man alone in his cage was more than he could handle. Even if he secretly believed the world was a little better with Aloysious Starkweather not running about in it. It was during one of these rants that he first heard the story of the Shades. A warlock couple who had been raising a human son and building enchanted automatons. They'd been killed by the Shadowhunters of the York Institute. When Jem relayed the story to Tessa she had lit up but hadn't been able to explain to him what she knew only that it had to do with what Shade had looked like and magic. Their ability to communicate still hit walls even with all the tricks they’d picked up.

Jem wanted to hear her talk. He wanted to know exactly which thoughts went with her changing expressions. He wanted to know, not just to guess. Every moment he could, he spent with her. He invented reasons to get her alone. In any other situation it would have been so improper as to be scandalous. Maybe it was scandalous under these circumstances as well. Richard was too focused on his explorations to notice and Kal never questioned them.

It had been only a few months before that she had started offering him her neck and not her hand when he fed. This was another secret. The others must have guessed that there was blood involved but no one mentioned it. Jem was healthier than he should have been. They did it infrequently so that she wouldn’t become truly anemic. The first time had terrified him. There was so much more potential to hurt her like this but she’d snuggle in close to him and tilt her head back with perfect trust. It had become something so private and intimate that Jem couldn’t imagine ever doing it with someone else.

He’d mastered the art of just barely breaking the skin so the blood flowed slow. There was a danger in this because she’d simply curl into him and he couldn’t see her face to tell when he’d taken too much. That unnatural bliss of a vampire’s bite meant that she would let him drain her without a word of protest. She held his hand so if he got lost in it, he would at least be able to feel the strength go from her fingers.

After a bite he’d hold her until her lethargy had cleared. Sometimes she’d nuzzle into his neck, play with his hair, hold on to him like he was the only thing that kept her from drowning. In those moments he stopped trying to talk himself out of being in love with her. He let himself not care that he was a vampire and she was bright and gloriously alive. More than once he’d caught her face during those moments and tilted it up in the prelude to a kiss that he had never been able to start.

It was the last time when she'd finally done what he hadn't been able to. Neither of them knew that it would be the last time, that her time in that place was so close to being over. His hand was curved around her cheek, she sat in the arm chair beside him, almost on top of him with her knees thrown over his lap and the arm of the chair beyond. He started to lean in and before he could remember what he was doing and where he was and why he wasn't allowed, she grabbed his shirt front and pulled him down to kiss him first.

He froze and as a vampire, when he froze he ceased to move at all. No heartbeat, no breathing, still as a statue. She pulled back, still holding on, her mouth just a little open and she looked at him with wide eyes. The start of an apology on her face. And that was the end of his ability to say no to her. He kissed her back, pulling her into him more tightly. Her responses were hesitant at first but she matched him in intensity. With one arm around her waist to hold her close his other ran up her arm, over her shoulder, down her back and then back up again. She looped hers around his neck.

Instinct and desire took hold and pulled him forward. His hand found her waist and her stomach, the corset underneath hiding things he wanted to touch. What did the skin on her hips, right here, feel like, he wondered. Then his hand was moving higher. She shuddered under him and recoiled with a sudden violence. She pulled back. A little lost, he held on for a moment before he realized what was happening. That split second of holding while she pushed away left her looking at him with fear in her eyes in a way he hadn’t seen since that first day.

She had backed away from him and stood stiff. The fear disappeared almost as quickly as it had come on but he couldn't forget the expression. He flattened his hands on his knees and held as still as he could.

"Tessa," he started and she was fighting to control some reaction.

She came back to him and pushed her fingers through his hair. He held still and watched her face, "I'm so sorry," she whispered even though to say so many words at once hurt.

"You do not need to apologize to me," he said, standing, gathering her hands in his. "There is nothing you did wrong. I should not have been so forward. I've wanted to do that for a long time and I made a mess of it. I won't -"

She stopped him with another kiss, this one much more gentle. Only her lips touched his.

"Slow," she murmured squeezing his fingers against the little stab of pain of the spell.

"I will be slow for you. I will be anything you need me to be," he said.

Then her arms were around him and her face was pressed into his chest. He held her until Richard started yelling for them to come see what he had found.

* * *

Air vents ran through the fortress and they carried sounds from other parts of the complex. In vented rooms they were always very careful to keep their voices low. Most of the vents were vertical or so narrow that they were impassable but Richard kept looking. Jem helped sometimes and so did Kal but it was a single minded mission for Richard that it wasn't for the others. It had started to seem impossible once they’d climbed into everything large enough to admit a body. Jem and Tessa found Richard and Kal in one of the abandoned rooms at the far end of the hallway. It held nothing. Just a wide, stone space with less perfect walls than the other rooms.

Richard stood at the far end where a crack ran up the side of the wall that was big enough to slide through sideways. It was cramped and the draft pushed dust down and out. Richard was broad shouldered and had to struggle to get out of it. He was filthy.

"I found it," Richard said.

"A hole," Kal said.

"It's climbable," Richard said with a smirk.

Jem said nothing but stepped forward into the gap and looked up at a vent like all the others but Richard told him to keep going and he wormed his way farther back to find a second space where the walls were not smooth, there were gouges and imperfections that could easily serve as hand holds. He looked straight up, his head tilted all the way back to see if there was any evidence of where it went.

"Have you climbed it yet?" Kal asked.

"Found a locked door. I want to take the little stele wielding girl up to see what's behind it," Richard said.

"Yes," Tessa said immediately and Jem could see her craning her neck to look at the space.

"I'm going to lead, you put your feet where I do, hold the same things that I do," Richard said, "James here will follow behind."

"And I shall stay and make tea?" Kal said.

"You can go up after if you'd like," Richard said. "He won't let her go without him and I need her. You can make your own decisions." He pointed his finger at each of them in turn. Jem climbed back out of the gap and brushed dust off himself. He liked that he was simply assumed to be coming if Tessa was. She caught his eye and gave him the smallest of smiles.

The ascent wasn't easy and Tessa had nothing to wear that wasn't a dress which didn't help matters as it snagged on everything. Richard had to pull her up at some points and Jem had to climb up and help boost her up or get her untangled but they made it. With Tessa's feet on solid ground, Jem turned to pull Kal out of the hole. It opened into a small room not unlike the one below it but this one was full of cabinets. Jem opened one. Inside were ledgers full of numbers. He slapped it shut and pulled another. All the same. Accounting.

"He really is a banker," Jem said.

Tessa caught is eye out of sight of Richard and Kal and a little spark of blue fire jumped between her fingers. She was getting very good at that. She raised her eyebrows.

"Probably a bad idea," he said.

"What's a bad idea?" Kal asked having missed the little fire show.

"Dawdling," Jem said.

The hallway beyond the door was deserted and almost identical to theirs. Tessa ran her hand over one of the nearby doors and looked up and down the empty space. With his usual single mindedness Richard headed for the open end of the hall.

Jem turned in time to see him collide with a barrier exactly the same as the one below. Jem wasn't used to vampire speed but he was learning to use it when he had to and he reached Richard's side in time to clamp a hand over his mouth before his rage could overflow in someway that would get them all caught. Jem held him. It shouldn’t have been possible, he was tall but much thinner than Richard but he was a vampire and he wasn’t hungry. Richard fought him but Kal helped talk him down out of the rage. When Jem released him they stared each other down for a split second.

Tessa stayed well back but when Richard had calmed enough to be released, she squeezed his shoulder. He'd taken a swing at her more than once that summer when the rage took over but even that couldn't drive her away entirely. Then they started on doors. One room was full of spare parts including a dismantled mechanical hand that twitched of its own accord. Most of them were empty but on the opposite side of the hall there was only one door. They left it for last. When Tessa drew the rune and pushed it open there was a long moment where everyone held their breaths.

Inside was not an army of automatons. Inside were cages, prison cells lined up along both walls. About the size of Jem's little prison a floor down. At first Jem had thought that they were empty but there were people stirring inside them, sitting up to look at the interruption. Not every cage was occupied but a large number of them were.

"By the Angel," said Kalyani looking around the space.

"We aren't the only ones," Richard murmured.

Jem stepped into the room. It was long and thin, almost a parallel hallway but wider and lit by that strange greenish light that the rest of the fortress was. He met the eyes of a young woman standing behind the bars of the cage with her arms crossed.

"Tatiana?" he asked. Jem had known Tatiana Lightwood in passing. Will had embarrassed her once at a Christmas party and as Jem had always been with Will she had always treated him much as one would treat a slug found on a dinner plate. She frowned at him as though unable to place him.

"Is this a rescue?" Tatiana asked.

"Not quite," Jem admitted.

"Jemmy?" A voice from further down the hall swung his head around. A very small, very thin woman in a ragged charcoal dress leaned on a cell door across the way. Her hair was smoothed and twisted back but in need of washing but she still managed to look like a general overseeing troops.

"Charlotte," he breathed out. He didn't use the vampire speed on purpose this time and was a little shocked to find himself barreling into her cage and locking his hands around the bars, "I thought you were dead."

"And I thought the same of you, how are you?" she put a hand out to pat his cheek.

"I am dead," Jem said flatly. "Vampire."

He wasn't sure he'd ever said it before and it hurt a little to hear it aloud. He was a vampire. Not in theory but in practice. He was a vampire. Charlotte gave him such a sad look that it made it just a little worse. But she was Charlotte and she would not dwell when there were practical matters to handle.

"How did you get in here?" she asked.

"Tess," Jem said and waved her over and she came to stand beside him. He pitched his voice loud, making sure the room could hear him, "We're being held on the floor below you. Tessa is a shadowhunter," he gave her a little look to tell her not to argue that point, "She managed to get a stele. We've been trying to open as many doors as possible. Richard found the way up here. There isn't a way out once you get to the hall."

Tessa rummaged in her pocket and pulled out the stele. She glanced at Jem as though making sure that it was the right thing to do and then drew the rune on the door of Charlotte's little prison and it swung open. Then she left Jem to his little reunion with Charlotte who threw her arms around his waist and gave him a tight hug. Tessa moved down the line, opening doors and saying nothing. Kal took up Jem's usual place at her side. Just a little bit defensive as though daring anyone to try something against the girl. Every cage held a young woman. No one younger than Tessa, not many older than Charlotte. There were only about twenty of them.

"Did you take the deal?" one of the girls asked Tessa and she frowned and cocked her head to the side.

"What deal?" Kal answered for her, covering her silence.

"He told us that if we agreed to carry a child for him we could be released from the cages, put up somewhere nice, with better food," the girl said.

"More than a few have taken it," Charlotte said. "We never see them again."

Tessa shuddered just a little at the very thought of it and someone else said, "That is how I feel about it too."

Jem came to stand nearer to Tessa who had already looked pale but this conversation was pushing her back behind that barrier into a place where she was not only silent but distant. He brushed his hand against hers, hidden behind her skirts and hooked her pinkie finger with his. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it in frustration. She knew something about this and what it meant. Maybe she knew where the girls had gone or why Mortmain wanted Shadowhunter children. They didn’t have the time it would take to get to the answers.

Everyone milled around. There was a flurry of compared notes. Everyone had a similar experience except everyone up here was still Nephilim and no one downstairs had been offered a deal. Jem was surprised by how overwhelming he found this many people. Charlotte was the unquestioned leader of the little troupe and moved through them to check on them. Kal took the lead in explaining what they knew and how they knew it and Jem was surprised when she looked to him to fill in the gaps or clarify points. When had he become someone that others turned to like that?

"We've got less than an hour," Richard said, speaking Jem’s thoughts aloud. "Before the automatons activate and start bringing breakfast. We need to decide what we will do."

Tessa rolled the stele between her fingers and Jem knew exactly what she was about to suggest. He very gently took her arm and said, "I need to speak to you for a moment." She let him draw her out into the hallway and away from the door.

"It is all the protection you have," he said to her.

"Will," she said.

"He can get you another but you don't know when you'll be in London next. I don't want you unprotected," he said. He also trusted her to have the means of opening doors. She wasn't going to get caught. She was too smart. They’d never had the option of letting someone else make those decisions and Jem was worried about what someone like Tatiana would do if she wasn’t thinking clearly.

She frowned and looked back at the room and then back at him her expression all concern.

"They need it more," he conceded and she nodded. She watched him carefully and he realized what else she was giving up in giving it away. She was giving up the ability to open his door whenever she wanted to.

"We'll get another," he said and then he kissed her quick and soft. "Give it to Charlotte. She'll make the best decisions."

They had to move fast to show Charlotte and the others where to find the gap to the lower level and to get them to close the doors with the stele before automatons came out of their cases to perform their chores. Jem stole one last kiss from Tessa before he went to go and allow himself to be locked away again. She was the last thing he saw before the door shut.

It would be a very long time before he saw her again. 


	10. Perfect Plan B

* * *

Gideon Lightwood

October 24, 1882

* * *

 

The warehouse stood on a narrow street that was lined on one side by tumbling houses. The open packed dirt yard of the warehouse was clear and organized, the brickwork in good repair, not a single broken window. Not yet, at least, but if the day went as planned that would change. The rest of the neighbourhood was not nearly so lucky.

Mortmain's monsters had been unveiled to the mundane population in an Exposition of his own invention. It was patterned on the Great Expositions 1851 and 1862. A fair of progress and excitement. For a little while it was believed that this technology would fuel Britain's empire and legacy. The sun never sets on the British Empire and the Automatons would ensure that the British were victorious in war and prosperous in peace time. Among the elites who saw the brushed and tailored automatons performing tricks it seemed a sure thing. But this neighbourhood had seen the creatures roll off the assembly lines and patrol the gates.

Everyone who could leave, had done so.

It left abandoned buildings where revolutionaries could creep about and prepare to plant bombs. There had been three bombings at similar locations in the last month. Mortmain had responded by tripling protections at the remaining factories. It was a useless gesture. The bombs had all been planted at the same time in five factories. More guards might keep out revolutionaries but they wouldn't help find the bombs they didn't know were already there.

Gideon Lightwood was on the inside of the fence, standing as far from the hulking demonic pieces of metal as was polite. That he had to consider the etiquette of standing in the same space as the monsters who had killed his sister and her family, turned his stomach. But he stood. He stood on that dusty patch of ground and looked at the empty eyes of houses in disrepair and reminded himself that it would be worth it in the end.

The carriage he was waiting for rattled up to the gate and he double checked that his face showed nothing. He was quite good at it. He had been raised in a family with two faces after all. A public self and a private self. Gideon had learned how to use it to his advantage. His private self didn’t get much chance to come out. He could only really be himself around one person and he saw her about twice a month and they never had enough time to talk. He wasn't even sure that she noticed him as more than a useful asset.

The door swung open and Axel Mortmain stepped down first, his hair carefully combed and his suit neat and well made if not quite the height of fashion. He turned to help a young woman step down to the ground. She took her hand away from his as soon as her feet were on the ground. She was fashionably dressed in yellow and blue, young enough to be Mortmain's daughter with a guarded expression and alert eyes. After greeting Gideon, Mortmain took the girl's arm and drew her towards the door to the factory without making proper introductions.

"This way darling, come and see the new ones. Gideon will be taking notes on behalf of his father who was too ill to make it today. These will be the automatons that will accompany us when we visit St. Petersburg next month. They're sleeker and not so intimidating as these ones," he tapped a nearby automaton on its chest and there was a hollow ringing. The creature didn't react. The woman looked at Gideon again as they fell into step in the entrance to the little suite of offices. Her eyes lingered on his runes and she didn't seem to approve. The shift in expression was so subtle it was hard to tell but Gideon had the distinct sense that he wasn't liked. Of course a girl in Mortmain’s care would hate Shadowhunters, it was probably a requirement.

"She hasn't seen the factories since they were much smaller and run by the wolves, I thought it would be a nice surprise for her to see them as they were meant to be," Mortmain was saying but he still hadn't given the girl a name beyond dear or darling. She avoided looking directly at him but never fought his hand on her arm.

Mortmain had run into issues in Europe during his summer tour that he hadn't anticipated. Gideon hadn't been surprised when Idris had sent him packing and neither had anyone else. That they'd done it nicely was something of a disappointment. It was said that the Iron Sisters were working on new weapons that would allow the Shadowhunters to destroy the automatons as they would any other demon. It was said that when they were complete that Alicante was prepared to go to war to keep Mortmain's army off the continent. It was said that the London rebellion would be destroyed by Christmas without reinforcements. It was said that Mortmain's favourite colour was green. There were a lot of things that had been said.

After successful alliances signed in Berlin and Amsterdam, Mortmain had hit opposition in France. It had not been only the Shadowhunters of France that had rejected his overtures of friendship. It had been the Downworlders. He had been told time and time again at the markets, by the heads of the packs and the clans that he would find no allies there. An invasion was still a possibility of course but it would be a very different matter to go up against a united front where Shadowhunters stood with Downworlders against an anticipated threat. There would be no surprise sweep of Paris as there had been of London. It would be true war. He returned to England without starting it.

The Magister had decided to change his approach as his diplomatic missions moved farther east and it seemed that a new set of automatons would be a part of that change. Gideon looked up as they stepped into the main room that rang with the clatter and the hiss of machinery. Narrow lanes snaked between machines and stacks of parts. Half assembled automatons lay on tables and conveyor belts. Scaffolds and pulley systems stretched high above them. Gideon looked to the clock hung high above the works to check the time. Timing was essential. When he turned back to Mortmain he was surprised to see that the girl had done exactly the same thing. Checked the time and then pretended that she hadn't.

When this plan had been hatched, Gideon had sat with Sophie and a few of the Shadowhunters to work out the details and the timing and what exactly his role would be. They had known far more about the factory and the invitation sent to his father for a tour than he had expected.

"See Soph," Will had said, "The information is good. Gideon agrees with her." The _her_ in question had been another of Sophie's spy network. Gideon knew very little about the others beyond their existence. It had taken more than a year before Gideon had been allowed to meet with more than Sophie herself. There were worse things than meeting with Sophie and her silent guard who always wore a deep hood and kept watch. He knew now that it hadn't been the same person every time and once Sophie had deemed Gideon safe, it had sometimes even been a tall boy in the hood and not a seasoned body guard at all. He worried about her being left out to hold those meetings without adequate support. 

Gideon reappraised the girl in her yellow dress. Shy and quiet but paying very close attention. Mortmain was telling them in great detail about the manufacture process and how it was now entirely automated and run by the things it created. A perfect self-propagating system. She wasn't looking at him. Every line of her body was tense and it had to be more than the noise. A crate was dropped with a thunk and she flinched and it all made sense.

She knew exactly what was about to happen and she didn't have Gideon's exit plan.

Mortmain had said the visit was a surprise for her. She had passed on the information that would put him in a building about to blow and then found herself there as well. This was Sophie’s other spy. He swung a foot with planned carelessness and brought down a stack of boxes. She yelped and stepped back which put her close enough that he could grab her arm and yank her to the side under the guise of being helpful.

"When it starts, you follow me, as fast as you can," he said into her ear and then stepped away from her offering apologies and turning Mortmain's attention to anything but her startled face.

Of course, the entire thing was dependent on the timing of one of Henry's devices and it didn't go quite according to plan.

 

* * *

William Herondale

* * *

 

Will hit the door at the top of the stairs with his shoulder hard enough to knock it loose of the rattling hinge that it hung on. He caught it in surprise and halfheartedly pushed it back into place though a single hinge couldn't hold it. He ignored it and finished his dash to the dirty window which was thrown open to give a view of the factory complex below.

"Is he in there? Did you see?" Will asked Sophie who stood by the window. He was flushed from the cold and the running but not out of breath.

"His carriage is here, as is the Institute's," Sophie said with her voice harsh. Will leaned past her to see it. It was the same carriage that had been there when the Institute had been theirs. Same symbol on the side, same seat where Thomas had sat to drive the horses, same horses. Will glanced at the horses, he had helped name them, he missed them. Everything that had happened and his heart still found time to miss the horses. You don't need anything else to worry about, he tried to tell it but he missed the horses regardless.

"Rupert's going to lead," Will said. "He's got the signal for the first on the east side. Gideon can get him in the right place."

"I know," Sophie said. Will fairly vibrated with energy. The battles without a battle always left him like this. All they needed to do was wait until Gideon cleared the building on the south side and then push the button on the little signal machine that Henry had created. It was the same invention that had allowed Will to signal his distractions to get into and out of Mortmain's house. Now the second one that would receive the signal was connected to the explosive and the little spark of magic should ignite it. First one side of the factory and then the other and finally the center of the production floor would explode.

The plan had three desired effects. The first which they didn't really think would succeed was kill Mortmain. A factory full of creatures designed to protect him would not allow that to happen. The second was to slow down production of the automatons. And the third was to put Gideon Lightwood back above any and all suspicion. Between Gideon and Tessa there was far too much accurate information flowing out of Mortmain's camp and into their's. Someone was bound to get suspicious. He'd had a run in with his father that had led to him asking Sophie if the resistance could hide him if he left.

This was the last ditch attempt to clear their spy's name so he could continue spying. If he were a sympathizer and a spy, why would he be right at the site of the bombing?

Will checked his pocket watch and tried to avoid bouncing on his toes like an impatient child. He had just been to see Rachel Penhallow who held the third igniter for the final bomb. This was the most responsibility she had yet been given on a mission and she had been twice as wound up as he was. It was possible that her emotions had spilled over into him. The third bomb was in the middle of the factory, beneath the floor where the machinery was. It would make sure that everything left was annihilated.

Three minutes left.

It was a good plan.

Three minutes later the first bomb failed to go off on time.

 

* * *

Gideon Lightwood

* * *

 

Gideon had asked all the right questions. They were on the east wall which was solid brick and a scaffold hung above them holding disembodied arms ready to be put onto the next batch of automatons when they were ready. It was the worst possible place to be if a bomb were to destabilize the wall and cause things to start falling. Mortmain was showing him two sets of blue prints that elaborated the difference between the older and new models. Neither the machinery nor the magic meant much to Gideon but he asked questions using all the vocabulary he had specifically learned for the purpose of keeping them near that wall.

Where was the fire?

The fire should have started by now. He double checked the clock. And started planning contingencies.

 

* * *

William Herondale

* * *

 

Will swore. Then he swore again more creatively. The bomb still hadn't gone off. Swearing was not going to fix the problem.

"Plan B?" Sophie asked.

"Five more minutes," Will said.

The minutes crawled by in tense silence and the bomb didn't go off.

"Plan B," Will said and snapping the watch shut and pressing his igniter. It worked perfectly.

It blew the south wall in a thunder clap of fire and showering bricks. Gideon would be driven out the north exit where a spotter would signal Rachel who would be able to blow the final bomb after he was clear.

It would have been a perfect Plan B.

It would have been if the second bomb had been a failure.

It wasn't. It was just late.

 

* * *

Gideon Lightwood

* * *

 

The explosion knocked everyone off their feet. Gideon scrambled up and scanned the room. The fire was already burning across the wood floor and would start climbing toward the ceiling fast. A gaping hole existed where the wall had previously been. Metal bodies moved back forth, whirring and clicking and speaking in those harsh demonic voices that put his teeth on edge. He couldn’t make out what was being said. The explosion had left his ears ringing.

And the girl was gone. He swung around. The automatons were moving in and his defenses went up as his instincts screamed that danger was coming. They came for Mortmain who had made it back to his feet as well. They closed around him, dull metal bodies blocking the man from view in the thickening smoke.

Mortmain was yelling for the girl, sending something after her. As the automaton broke away from the pack, Gideon saw which direction it was heading in and caught sight of the girl who had headed for the blueprints on their high wooden table. She saw the automaton coming and hastily finished rolling the papers up and then ran. She was much faster than she looked. 

Both Gideon and Mortmain yelled after her but their voices were lost in the second explosion.

The second explosion which was much, much closer.

Gideon lost sight of her in the ensuing chaos. Something had gone blessedly wrong with the accelerants and there wasn’t much fire but falling machinery and the stomping automatons put enough mess between them to make it impossible to find her again. As it was supposed to, the wall started to fall and he got caught up in the tide of metal bodies pushing Mortmain to the safety of the north doors.

She had been headed in the other direction.

Just as planned, once Gideon was spotted outside the building, the final bomb went off. 


	11. Fight or Flight

* * *

William Herondale

October 24, 1882

* * *

 

Will sat in the window with his feet hanging over the sill like a little boy on a garden wall. Sophie had gone to round up the others and make sure that Gideon had all of his pieces still attached. He drummed his heels against the wall beneath the window and watched as the roof over the west side of the factory finally gave up and collapsed.

He should leave, he should certainly not be sitting so obviously but he almost wanted something to happen. The destruction had gone according to plan but the adrenaline, the need for a fight, thrummed through him. Reckless. The more logical part of his mind was telling him, Go home. Read a book. Write another letter to Tessa. Reread the last one from Jem. Don't sit here. But he did, playing with a knife in his fingers and feeling the weight of the sword worn across his back like a promise. Something was about to happen.

His first thought when he saw it was, "Now the bastards can fly?"

He watched it come down on his side of the factory. The packed dirt yard was no longer neat and orderly. The thing with the metal wings set down on the street just outside the gate and then it flashed and started to shrink. It wasn't one thing. It was two. The automaton with the wings was rapidly vanishing, shrinking down and down and down until Will couldn't see it. Leaving only a crumpled form in a dress on the side of the road.

Frozen for a moment, Will tried to make sense of it. There had been another person in the factory. He swore. They'd been sure, they'd done every inch of research to make sure that there were no living staff. An automaton had removed her and left her. She didn't move and Will dropped out of his window seat, grabbing the roof edge above and swinging himself sideways to land on the lower roof of the building next door. His foot slipped just a bit on the roofing tile as he turned to look down again.

She had pushed herself up and then turned sideways and leaned against the gate to vomit. Then her head snapped up and her shoulders set and Will knew exactly who it was. He opened his mouth to call her name but before he could get it out he saw what she had heard. Automatons, still streaked with soot and dirt from the crumbling factory headed across the yard to the back gate. She gathered her scattered papers and ran.

He took off in the same direction, moving over the roofs as she ran along the street. The houses were all roughly the same height and he was faster than she was which balanced out the time he lost when he did have to climb over a gap or up to a higher level.

When he hit the corner he dropped off the edge without pausing and rolled as he hit the street. He came up in a fighting stance and there was no one there but a woman dumping washing water into the gutter. The rest of the street was gathered to watch the fire. She didn't see him.

"Tessa!" he called listening for footsteps.

The intersection between the two roads was full of gawkers muttering about the bombing and the other ones like it. He scanned the crowd for her. She'd been easy to see when he'd been above, the dress was bright yellow and she'd been moving in the opposite direction of the flow of traffic. It was the movement that he caught again and he dove back into the crush of mundanes of stepped out of his way to allow him to pass without noticing him at all. She was flagging, slower now than she had been.

The crowd was yelling behind him which meant whatever was after her had made it this far. He put on a last burst of speed and grabbed her arm, swinging her sideways into an alley. She screamed and kicked him in the leg. Hard.

"Tessa," he started but she swung an elbow up in a well targeted strike that would have hit him in the side of the face if he hadn't been faster than she was. He caught her arm and held it. She looked at him with wide eyes and an open mouth ready to scream. The start of a struggle died when she met his eyes. A look of pure relief washed over her and he prayed that he was capable of living up to it.

"That was a hell of a kick, Angel," he said letting go of her and stepping back.

She looked back to the street. When she turned back to him, his hand was out, "Are you ready to run?"

He ran his thumb over the empty spot on her wrist where the bands had sat every other time he'd seen her. Not trapped, not right now. He gathered all her papers from her and without looking at them, folded them small enough to fit inside his pocket so that they'd both have free hands. 

He pulled her forward, down toward narrower alleys where the twisting would keep them ahead of pursuit.

 

* * *

 

She saw the next problem coming before Will did. He had pulled her up onto a rooftop, a more difficult feat in a fashionable dress and crinoline than it was wearing boots and trousers, when she froze. He took her wrist and she grabbed his shirt sleeve and wrenched him around with more strength than he would have expected from her and pointed out the shadows running through the dark edges below them. She tapped an incisor and he realized she was right.

"Glad one of us is paying attention," he murmured to her as he scanned the shadows. It had gotten dark as they'd moved and the vampires were out. Mortmain controlled almost all the vampire covens in London. Any of them that didn't offer perfect loyalty had relocated to places outside the city either by choice or force.

She touched her nose as the shadows moved upwards farther down the block. They climbed the brick work of a tall tenement and moved fast. It took him a moment to understand what the gesture meant. They were following her by scent.

"The evening just got more interesting," Will told her. "Are you a better fighter or a better runner?" He wasn't expecting much but she had kicked him hard enough to bruise and the elbow hadn’t been thrown by chance. She surprised him by stretching out a hand that lit up with blue fire and smirking at him. In that moment she was terrifying and beautiful. Her face cast in sharp blue light for just an instant that reflected off her eyes and picked out the lines of her face before she doused the fire an instant later.

"Stand and fight then," Will said reevaluating her. "Best find better ground"

He led her up to a higher rooftop. Vampires could jump and he didn't want to be caught with anything above them. She had good balance, standing steady in fashionable boots on the peaked roof. He calculated their odds. They were going to need an awful lot of luck to make it through this. He announced loudly in a tone one might use to inquire about the weather, "We might not die here!” She smirked but it wasn’t quite the laugh he’d promised he would get out of her.

“Would you like a knife?" he asked still keeping up the genteel tone. “Would you like another glass of wine before the vampires arrive to drag us back?”

She shook her head spreading both hands and lighting them up. The blue light was the only illumination this high. They were above the fog as well as the lanterns at street level. The October evening was cloudy and the moonlight flitted through the clouds unsteadily. The blue light was unearthly. Transforming the slate tiles to an uneven texture below them and the spaces below them were blacker for the being outside the halo of light.

"They should be here," Will said at almost the same moment that she hurled the first ball of fire. She was facing away from him and threw it into a black corner below them that flared blue before an orange flame caught and a shriek broke through the otherwise quiet night.

Evening in London neighbourhoods like this could be a hubbub of conversation, back alley commerce and jovial drunks but when the stomp of metal feet was heard, everyone mundane and Downworlder alike, disappeared inside. It was not unlike being the only living people in the world. A candle lit window two buildings over suddenly went dark as the vampire’s shriek continued. Doors and shutters slammed shut. The neighbourhood locked down under them. They weren't the only people living here but everyone hoped they'd be the only ones to die.

"We’ve come to take you home, darling," a nasal voice drifted from somewhere nearby. Almost gentle. Tessa responded by pushing the flare of fire higher which lit the rooftop better. Will got a few moments of light that allowed him to aim three runed daggers that brought down three advancing vampires who had been creeping through the shadows. One of them caught fire as he fell, she hit two of them with another fireball. It was the perfect weapon for vampires and being so high would slow down the automatons that were probably on their heels.

"Look at the little shadowhunter, darling, you can bring him home with you, keep him as a pet," the voice was curling and insinuating. There was compulsion in it. She screamed and Will had to resist the urge to wheel to see if she'd been injured. The first vampire in range had made the jump onto their rooftop and he was distracted by hacking her into pieces. Three more fell away burning and falling into the crowd which spread the fire. The mass of vampires retreated from the shrieking flaming scrum below them. The heat was intense. A vampire burned fast and hot and down to ash in minutes.

"Too many," Will said backing up to catch a look at her. She met his gaze, apparently uninjured, still glowing with blue fire.

Her hand closed around his wrist, half the light dying. She was looking towards a stretch of rooftop that looked clear. She moved first and dropped onto the lower roof and hit the ground, rolling sideways. He pulled her to her feet.

"Time to run, Tess," he said and they did. The next building over had broken windows on it’s highest floor. A flaming vampire had made a run for it and set the room beyond on fire as it died. Will pushed her through the hole and had to grab her waist to keep her from falling. She wasn’t breathing properly, he could hear a hitch in each gasp.

"They won't follow us in here," he told her when she had regained her footing. She gave him a look that implied she thought he might be better suited to a madhouse than the vampire hunting business. They headed toward the doors and the sounds of people below screaming about the fire, waking the neighbours and creating a surging mass of humanity. It was a good crowd to get lost in. Will hit the street running full tilt and she struggled to keep up with him.

When he found a street with shops he chose a men's clothiers and used a rune to open a door. She slammed the door behind them and sunk to the floor on her knees, eyes fluttering shut. Will crouched beside her. She was pale and dirty, her hair was a wild tangle of half slipped pins and ashy tendrils. There was still a flower in place just above her ear. Her hands were curled in her lap and she hunched over them as she tried to catch her breath

"That was amazing magic but we’re not safe yet," Will said. "At least every girl loves a shopping trip doesn't she?" He spread his hands at the dark shop full of suits and trousers and she gave him that “get thee to a madhouse” look but struggled to her feet and followed him deeper into the shop.

He had to pass her a knife so she could cut her way out of the remains of the dress while he found clothing that looked like it might fit her. He was wrong. Twice. When she emerged from the office in the back that she’d been using as a dressing room, she wore a suit that was too large for her and didn’t really make her look less like a girl. She was also ashy pale and barely breathing.

The little office was utilitarian and aggressively neat and tidy. He pushed her into the leather desk chair and she collapsed more than sat down. With the door shut, he could use a witchlight.

“Where are you hurt?” he asked. Some of the injuries were superficial, a bruise over one cheek and burns on her hands where she’d lost control of the fire. Neither of those things explained the vomiting or the trouble breathing. She twisted in the chair and lifted the shirt high enough that he could see bruising spread across her side. This wasn’t superficial. It was dark and angry looking probably the result of internal bleeding and broken ribs.

She face was drawn but she was eerily calm as though having half the bones in her chest broken wasn't much of a problem. 

“I’m going to use an iratze,” he said. She shook her head vehemently which made her waver. If she hadn’t been sitting, she would have fallen. He steadied her shoulder in case she did faint. A tiny spark jumped between her fingers before fizzling. Reminding him that she wasn’t really a Shadowhunter.

“I guess we’re going to have to go visit a friend,” he said. “Magnus is going to kill me for this.”


	12. Magnus Bane

* * *

Magnus Bane

October 24, 1882

* * *

Magnus Bane did not a have a permanent address. The appearance of automatons on the steps of Parliament had convinced enough of Britain's upper class mundanes to be elsewhere that he could squat in rather better style than he would have been able to accomplish on his own. His current place was a three story townhouse on Cheyenne Walk. It had been decorated by someone fussy and fond of things with frills. It was very pink. He liked it for its sheer absurdity. The person who had decorated it had no taste and did not care. Magnus liked to think he had better taste but he respected the lack of concern.

The servant's entrance banged open and Magnus rolled his eyes and put down his book before standing up. He wore black. A black suit, a black shirt, his hair hung almost to his shoulders, also black. He caught a look at himself in the ornately framed mirror in the hallway and smiled. He looked like the antithesis of the decorating style and that entertained him as well. In days like these, one needed to find entertainment where it popped up.

"You were supposed to be here an hour ago," he said stepping out into the hallway and heading for the kitchen.

In the kitchen was not only the surly but interesting Shadowhunter he had expected but also a girl. Magnus pursed his lips and the logical part of his brain told him to push them both out and slam the door. Will's face said "I have brought trouble" as brightly as if he were wearing a placard with the words printed on it. But she was pale and drawn and not breathing evenly. She was also dressed rather unconvincingly as a boy.

"You would have more luck dressing as a woman than she does dressing as a boy," Magnus said as greeting.

"Magnus," Will said.

"I suppose your new friend is someone I will regret inviting into my home," Magnus said.

"This isn't your home," Will retorted. "But yes. Most of Mortmain's allies are probably looking for her right now. You have good warding right? A tracking spell couldn't work in here?"

Magnus threw up his hands in exasperation and turned to return to the frilly drawing room. He did have good warding. It annoyed him that Will thought he was entitled to take advantage of it. He called over his shoulder, "Bring her in, wipe your boots."

Will told the story, as much of it as he knew and Magnus listened. Tessa Gray who was not a mundane, not a warlock and not a Shadowhunter, lay on her back on the chaise lounge while Magnus used magic to fix her three broken ribs and the internal bleed from her ruptured spleen. She kept glancing at Will whenever something hurt or Magnus made her uncomfortable. Will gave her the softest look Magnus had ever seen on his face. The strange, broken boy was someone entirely different than Magnus had ever met when he looked at the girl.

"Sit up," Magnus said reaching out a hand that the girl took as she did as she was asked. She took a deep shuddering breath and then another smoother one and then gave him a little bob of her head in what might have been thanks. 

"She's the antithesis of you," Magnus mused.

"What does that mean?" Will asked.

"You never stop speaking, even when it is in your own best interest. She hasn't said a single word since she came through the door," Magnus said. “Also I suspect she’s kinder than you are and she smells better.”

She gave him a little smile at that.

"Remember when I told you I had a friend who had an issue with a compulsion spell?" Will asked ignoring everything else. "She's the friend. It stops her from speaking. Anything she says is painful. I asked you if there was anything you could do and you told me that you'd need to see the spell. So, is there anything you can do?"

Magnus glared at Will, "Will you pay me the going rate?"

"What's the going rate?" Will asked glaring back.

Magnus considered quoting him something absurd but Will saw through the bluster faster than most people. Instead he said, "You can owe me a favour."

"That's a little steep," Will said.

Tessa watched them bandy back and forth with curiosity. Based on the story she'd never seen Will interact with anyone else. She seemed entertained by the little show. Magnus considered telling her to wait until she'd seen him argue with one Sophie Collins, ex-maid and current London spymaster. Magnus had only ever seen it happen once and it had been a display worth remembering. Few people expected humanity out of Will. Magnus knew why Will had been so awful for much of his youth and even he expected sarcasm and disdain. Sophie expected more from him and wasn't afraid to tell him when he failed to live up to those expectations.

Magnus gave Tessa a sly smile that did not include Will at all. She returned it a little smaller, an echo. He held out his hands and she put hers out as well without prompting. There was more than one spell on the girl. Magnus frowned at her as he tried to sort through them. There was something big and heavy that hung over her but he couldn't resolve what it was or what it meant. The compulsion spell was focused.

"You can fight this?" Magnus asked her. It was very a terrifically well laid spell.

Will leaned against the wall near the door. He was pretending that he wasn't a bundled of coiled energy. His anxiety fairly buzzed off him and Magnus considered telling him to leave but it wouldn't have made it better as Magnus suspected the anxiety would climb the farther he was from the girl.

She nodded and held up a hand to show him a small space between her fingers. It was a clear message but Will translated anyways, "Just a little. She can say about one word at a time."

"Say something," Magnus said. "I want to see how the magic reacts when you fight the spell."

"Yes," she said and her fingers tightened on his as a shudder ran through her. The magic rippled. The compulsion spell fed into the large one in some way and they both reacted. That wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was that what he had thought were extra spells weren't spells. They were just her. A cacophony of competing magics.

"What are you?" Magnus asked. It was asked with genuine curiosity but as soon as he said it he realized that it might be construed as a slightly rude thing to ask a lady.

"She's a girl who needs help," Will said before Tessa could even start to give him an answer. She turned away, her hands still in his and looked at Will who turned that intense and gentle look on her again. Magnus couldn't see her reaction to Will as he said, "That's all that matters."

"She's an incredibly powerful girl who has already saved your life more times than you have saved hers. So hush," Magnus told him and Tessa turned back to him with a little amused smile. Will's face was suspended between bemused and defensive. They were an interesting couple. Similar but oceans apart. She was soft and gentle with iron underneath while Will was all iron armour with all the softness buried beneath it.

"I can take off the compulsion," Magnus told them. "It won't be difficult. The other thing, I can't even figure out what it is.”

She tapped his hand, pulling his attention back to him and held up a hand so he could see the space left by a missing wedding ring. His first thought was to wonder where the jewelry had gone but then the rest of it came together.

"Wait here please," he said to the girl and then grabbed Will by his jacket collar and hauled him out into the hall where he pushed him back into a wall. Magnus considered banging him against the wall again just to get the point across but at the moment Will was too surprised to take a swing at him. He decided he didn't want to start a fight with the stupid Nephilim that much.

"You brought her here," Magnus growled.

"Most warlocks don't speak to me," Will said evenly. Magnus still had a hold of his shirt but being manhandled didn’t seem to bother him.

"I shouldn't either," Magnus said.

"I don't know what you are so concerned about," Will said.

"You're going to have half of London's Downworld coming after you by morning," Magnus said. "And you are going to bring them all down on me. I should have left this country before the borders closed. I certainly should never have gotten involved with you. He's married to the poor girl." He swore a little in a language he didn't expect Will to know. 

Tessa had appeared in the doorway of the room and watched them with steady eyes. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her hands were clenched into fists. The man's suit she wore made her look very tall and even thinner than she truly was. Magnus let go of Will's shirt and gave him one last hard look before turning back to the girl. He softened his expression before he turned around. This was not her fault. 

"Come sit down, I will explain this to our stupid friend," he said to her. She sat down on the sofa, farther from Magnus than she had been before. Will sort of flung himself down beside her. He straightened his shirt and adjusted his jacket with exaggerated care. Magnus ignored him and dropped into a floral armchair across from this very odd pair.

"There are rumours in Downworld that Axel Mortmain made a deal with a demon. That he is a demon. That he is a warlock or a disgraced Shadowhunter. Most of these rumours are so much garbage but there is one persistent one, that he isn't invincible. Yet," Magnus started.

"We've heard that too, that if we want to kill him it will need to be done sooner rather than later," Will said and Magnus wondered what it was that he wasn’t telling, "It's very rare anyone has a proper theory as to why."

"Her," Magnus said pointing at Tessa who raised her eyebrows but didn't look particularly surprised. "There is an unfinished spell hanging over her and a compulsion to force her to speak very specific words. Any word that isn't the one she needs to say is painful to speak. The unfinished spell is a ritual marriage, am I correct?"

She nodded slowly.

"You are a warlock but a very unusual one," she nodded again, "And once the marriage is complete, Mr. Mortmain will have full access to all her abilities. A warlock's immortality and all the magic she possesses as well as other benefits depending on who cast the binding. He's a man and look at all that he has done. This will give him incredible powers and she's keeping it away from him. Like a marriage, vows must be exchanged. If she does not vow, the spell remains unfinished. If she does vow she loses most of her free will and her life will become tied to his. I can see the appeal of silence."

"We got the same story from someone else. Why not find another warlock?" Will asked nodding and Magnus wasn't sure whether to be annoyed that he was being used to verify information or gratified that Will seemed to think his opinion worth more than the other contact's.

"Like your parabatai ritual, some things can only be done once. He has tied his only chance at this to her," Magnus said and he turned to Tessa directly, "It's really quite an impressive feat of defiance. How long ago was the ceremony?"

She held up four fingers.

"Four months? That's longer than I would have expected," Magnus said.

"Years," Will said.

"What?" Magnus said.

"I've known her longer than a few months. It's been years," Will said and the girl nodded.

Magnus looked back at Tessa. Thin and fragile looking but then, fighting a spell like that every hour of every day would take something out of a person. Magnus had been prepared to throw them out. He had been on the brink of throwing them out since he'd seen the girl but he just couldn't do it.

"I can remove the compulsion spell but I can't break the other," he said shaking his head at himself. There are worse hills to die on, he though. Anything that brought the end of Mortmain's reign over England closer to an end had to be a good thing.

"That favour," he said pointing at Will, "Is likely going to involve saving my immortal life. I like my immortal life."

"I will do my best," Will said.

“That’s oh so comforting,” Magnus rolled his eyes. Tessa met his eyes when he turned to her to explain, “That feeling of the compulsion fighting you for control will get much worse and then it will be gone. It won't be pleasant. Stay here."

And then he pushed himself up in one fluid motion and left the room. He came back with a bundle of supplies to find Will sitting beside the girl with her hand in his, speaking in a low voice. Magnus paused in the door way to watch them. This Will was an alien creature, utterly different from the Will that Magnus thought he knew. Magnus liked the entire boy better for the fact that this Will was a possibility.

Magnus kicked a rug out of the way and chalked a circle onto the wood floor and added a series of runes. Tessa came over to look at what he was doing and her expression wasn't just idle curiosity. He started to talk through each step and got one of those little smiles from her. She knew enough about magic to have some idea of what he was doing.

Will didn't have nearly as much knowledge of the process but he stayed near her and displayed polite interest. He had every mannerism of a dinner party guest being forced to listen to a dull conversation he couldn't escape. It might have been true boredom. It might have been an act. It was often impossible to tell with Will. Magnus flicked a finger and lit up the candles he had just finished placing. He didn't often get to do magic before an audience that might be impressed by his antics and he wasn't going to waste the chance.

Once it was done, he asked her to step into the middle of it. This time she didn’t turn to Will for reassurance before meeting Magnus’s eyes. He had passed whatever test she had to determine whether a person was a threat.

“This is going to hurt. Are you prepared for that?” Magnus asked. The girl squared her shoulders and nodded. He turned to Will, “Are you?”

“It will hurt me?” Will asked.

“No, are you prepared for it to hurt her?” Magnus said, “You’re just a touch protective. Know that if you break the circle, you risk the spell. Don’t do it.”

“I will sit right here until you tell me it is over,” Will said.

Tessa gave Magnus just the smallest bit of a smile when he turned back to her. She nodded again to tell him that she was prepared for whatever happened next.

Magnus settled himself into the magic and said the words that would light up the spell. The runes glowed and twitched and Tessa tensed. He met her eyes before finishing the incantation. He hadn’t been sure how much it would hurt only that it would. She screamed and curled into herself with her arms locked around her stomach as though trying to hold herself together. Magnus had a hand out and grabbed Will’s jacket, yanking him back hard.

“Not yet,” Magnus said.

The light died away and the runes on the floorboards faded away. Tessa knelt with her head down, her arms still locked around her body. Magnus let go of Will’s shirt and let him finish crossing the room to the girl. She flinched away from his touch before raising her eyes to meet his. There were tears on her cheeks. Magnus felt a pang of guilt. There had been no other way to break a spell like that. It couldn’t be done gently, it needed to be ripped away before it could force her to do what it wanted.

She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, a childlike gesture. Will crouched beside her, his hand hovering over her but not actually touching.

“Hello William,” she said in a clear, soft voice. The tears came harder and she leaned forward to cry into Will’s shoulder. 


	13. Reclusive Genius Shadowhunter

* * *

Tessa Gray

October 25, 1882

* * *

 

Tessa hated every flinch and hated every moment where she caught herself reaching for Will. He was always there to catch her if she wavered or needed something. She did not want to be a child and she'd already cried all over his shirt and then been unable to get words out around the tremours running through her muscles. It left her feeling more helpless than she had before the spell shattered around her. Of all the things to cry over, she'd cried over this. And she’d done it in front of him. The man who hadn’t even teared up when his legs had been smashed to pieces.

That evening, he hadn't been more than an arm's length away from the episode with the tears until she'd been given a bedroom on the upper level of the house. If she reached for him to steady her, he was there. It was comforting. It made her feel like a invalid. 

The room had been the first place she had slept in nearly four years that wasn't Mortmain's. It was gaudy and frilly and had awful roses on the wallpaper but it wasn't his and that made it beautiful. She'd borrowed a nightgown from the owner who must have been shorter and wider than she was and she slept poorly.

The spell had been pressure. It bore down on her body as much as it did on her mind and the lack of it was like being gifted a new body that didn't work the way she expected it to. The headache that jabbed at the back of her eyes was gone. She hadn't realized the nausea was always there until it was gone. Her muscles were shaking and weak but that might have been the magic from the fight on the rooftop. The memory of that shriek as the man had gone up in flame clawed its way to the top of her thoughts and the nausea was back for an entirely different reason. Was she any less the monster if she did it in self defense?

She shut the thoughts out and curled into the too soft lilac bedding. She lay awake a long time, whispering things to herself, repeating things until she could form all the syllables of a word clearly. Bits of poetry, things Jem had said, names, places, promises and hopes. Her voice was strange in her ears. She had spoke to herself in her head but pushing words past the nausea and the pain under her ribs had been so difficult that she'd rarely managed more than a single word at a time. Apparently it was possible to forget the sound of one's own voice.

 

* * *

 

She woke late to find the rest of the household already up and active. Her men's clothing made her uncomfortable because it was tight in the wrong places but it wasn't like anything else she'd ever worn. She wasn't Mortmain's china doll to dress up and drag around when she was dressed like this. Her face and hair came almost clean and she braided the hair back and tied it tightly. She checked the mirror. Thin, sickly pale, plain hair, plain eyes, not so pretty at all.

"It's just Will and Magnus," she told her reflection and didn't stumble over any of the words.

She followed the noise until she found a kitchen. Magnus was not wearing black. He was dressed very plainly in a deep brown suit but his shirt was riotiously green. Unnaturally green. Tessa resisted the urge to go and touch the fabric to see if it was glamoured in some way to make it so bright.

Tessa had met many warlocks during her time with Mortmain and they had always set her on edge. She was a warlock and every one she met made it seem more a curse. Magnus’s ridiculous clothing and that sheen of disinterest laid over genuine concern and Will’s faith in him, put him in another category altogether. It was possible to imagine that warlocks had hearts and souls when she looked at Magnus. It seemed impossible when she looked at Mrs. Dark or those warlocks at that party with their silver dust and holy water and laughter.

Will leaned over the table at the back of the space where the servants might sit to take their meals. He still wore the charcoal gray from the night before which made his hair look even blacker. He was talking to a pair of children while they stuffed food into their mouths.

Will swung around to look at her and grinned. He had been handsome blood soaked that first day she'd met him but healthy and smiling was something altogether different. She had the sudden urge to go back upstairs and force her hair or her skin or something into a better shape. There was no way she could stand with these two men looking like she did. There was no way she could stand with them at all. The brilliant warrior boy and this incredible warlock.

"Good morning," she said instead of turning for the stairs. She was not going to run away and there wasn't much to be done for the hair regardless.

"Mattie and Peter, this is Miss Tessa Gray," Will introduced her by name easily and without ceremony. Her name as it was. She almost cried or threw her arms around him. He didn't understand why it mattered, it was just courtesy but he used her name. He waved her over and once she was seated, he turned back to the children who were eating porridge. Who had cooked it? Magnus waved a finger and the pot pushed itself across the table towards her. She took a bowl and ate while Will talked.

The children were about 12 and they had the voyance runes of Shadowhunters on their hands. She thought they were too young to be warriors but Jem had told her about his own training while teaching her how to hold a broom handle in a proper swordsman's grip. He'd started training around the time she'd started learning how to do sums with her brother at Aunt Harriet's kitchen table.

Mattie and Peter would be carrying messages back to the Children's House where Tessa couldn't go because Mortmain would be searching for her. The plans she'd stolen included magic that Magnus understood but so many technical elements that it had been decided that an expert needed to be brought in. The expert was at the Children's House and would meet them somewhere else.

"He prefers not to leave the house but it'll be better if he can compare notes with Magnus," Will explained.

"Reclusive genius shadowhunters, how quaint," Magnus said but it wasn't really an objection. The boy kept looking at Magnus from the corner of his eye. He was pale with blonde hair that curled in all directions. The girl beside him was dark skinned with black hair worn long but tied back in a fashion that made her boyish. When Magnus caught the look, he made a face that involved widening his cat's eyes. The boy turned away, half delighted, half terrified. Tessa caught Magnus’s self-satisfied smile and echoed it back to him.

The habit of not speaking was a hard one to break and she stayed silent as instructions were given and repeated back. The back door slammed shut behind the children as they scampered out into the morning sunlight. Both Magnus and Will turned their attention back to her and she had the urge to retreat again. She was going to let them down if they kept looking at her like that. She was not so important.

"Where will we go?" she asked. Her words had too much space between them making her sound halting and a little bit stupid. She snapped her mouth shut.

"There's a house near the Institute that has warding in place. It's usually used by spies who need a place to hide," Will explained she looked up at him and he'd turned the full force of those eyes on her. "Henry will meet us there. He's a bit odd but kind. I promise."

She nodded then said, "Jem says," just saying his name aloud brought up the memory of the look in his eyes when he'd kissed her fast and hard before the doors had been closed. She shook the memory down and tried again, "Jem says you are rude to everyone." Still too much space between words but she'd said everyone properly which felt like an achievement.

"I've been trying to be better," Will said. "He was always the good one. I've been trying to live up to that example since he ... left. The last we heard, he'd been hurt at a party Mortmain threw. That was back in the spring before he left for the continent."

Will said it in such an even voice that she almost missed how important this was to him. He'd been worrying since April. That message hadn't come from her. She wondered who else was working against Mortmain from the inside. And that brought back the memory of the man with the sandy hair telling her to follow him before the bombs had gone off.

"The man," she said looking up at him, "The man in the fac'ry." She winced at the missed syllable. Now she sounded uneducated as well as stupid and slow.

"Gideon is fine," Will said. "He made it out. We knew he was there. The final charge wasn't set until after he was out. We didn't know you would be there. I didn't know that you had been there until I saw the automaton drop you onto the pavement."

She nodded and took a few deep breaths before returning to his question, "Jem was hurt. He is better. Nothing," she paused to make sure she had the syllables straight, "permanent. Kal still limps. I'm sorry." She apologized both for the injuries and the fact that her expression was crumbling. She was usually so much better controlled than this but the explosion and the loss of the spell and the taste of freedom had left her unbalanced.

"You needn't apologize, Tess," Will said touching her hand briefly.

"We'd best be going if we're going to be on time," Magnus said.

 

* * *

 

Magnus's house had been gaudy but homey. This place was utilitarian in the extreme. Most of the rooms were empty except for a small bedroom and a large sitting room. Neither of which had windows that looked out on the street. It was dark and plain with furniture that did not match. Tessa sat on the sofa and rubbed the scars on her palm. There was no change in the texture of the skin though the scar tissue was just a little lighter in colour. Otherwise they were invisible. Each of the marks Jem had left was a reminder that he was out there.

Usually she'd rub them and count down until the next time she would be away from Mortmain. Sometimes if she put all her attention on it, she could feel the ghost of him. Her own personal piece of home to carry around with her. She couldn't always call it up. It was almost like a the changes. Just a little spark of who he was in the depths of her mind. It always faded away too soon.

Those days when she was locked up in that cavern with nothing to do but read Will’s smuggled books and listen to Jem's stories were her some of her best memories. Now, she didn't know when she would see him next. She twisted her hands more tightly together and straightened her shoulders. Her aunt had told her that a tall girl would always look regal if she carried herself well. It helped to sit up straight when she needed to feel a little more regal.

"You've nothing to worry about with Henry," Will said softly from his perch on the arm of the sofa. He could read the distress but not the reason for it. He was all long angles and when he folded up with his elbows resting on bent knees, he reminded her a little of a bird of prey. Beautiful and deadly and untouchable.

It wasn't why she was nervous but before she could assemble the words to explain it, Henry was bustling through the door with a bag over one shoulder and a pair of young people behind him. They were the inverse of the children from that morning. A pretty blonde girl, about 16 and a tall dark skinned boy a little younger but no less beautiful. They were armed. Heavily.

Henry himself was unruly looking. His hair stuck up in a bright red cloud around his head and his clothing was mismatched. A grey jacket and brown trousers and a waistcoat in yellow that was almost as alarming as Magnus's bright green shirt. There was something absent about his movements as though he was thinking about something he had forgotten.

Will introduced her using her whole name again. Not the girl, not my wife or my companion, not some pet name, Tessa Gray. Rachel and Akash nodded but Henry Branwell shook her hand then seemed to remember that gentlemen do not shake the hands of ladies and bowed instead and then looked a little confused. She tried her best to smooth all the nerves out of her expression and to smile at him. No need for both to be ill at ease.

"Sophie says you're a spy," Henry said to her.

"Yes, sir," she said which he seemed to find delightful.

"And you've found plans for the automatons. They tried to find them when they set the bombs but they aren't stored at the factories over night. At least not that we could tell. Understanding the spells and the mechanisms will be very useful. It isn't easy to decipher after they've been damaged. Did you know that many have living parts inside? Mostly taken from mundanes," he was rummaging in his bag as he spoke and pulling things out.

"I did not know," she said softly.

"Henry," Will said as a sort of warning probably for scaring her which was sweet but there was little that could truly shock her anymore.

Magnus unrolled the plans that she had stolen so that Henry could see them. Just looking at the runes of the spells written there made her head swim. She kept her eyes anywhere but the plans. Of all the spells, that one was the hardest to see. It was immediately familiar though the magic was far and above anything she had ever been taught by the foul sisters at their lessons. It was incomprehensible even though she knew exactly what it did.

The memory of being bullied into the change that she couldn’t control rose in her mind. The green skinned man Mortmain had called Father who had taken control of her hands and written the spell out. Her hands. The change made them look like his hands but they were still her’s and she hadn’t been able to control them. Once she’d shook herself loose from it Mortmain had been pleased. Even then, she knew that if he was pleased, something was terribly wrong but she’d been given what she’d been promised.

Will had lost everything. Jem was sitting in that cage. Kal’s children were gone. All of those things had happened because she had written down that spell. She had opened the door for that long dead monster to give his monsterous son the means of destroying people more effectively than ever before. All so that she could see her brother again. She hadn’t know what she was trading but there it was. And she knew now that Nate hadn't been worth an inch of it. 

Henry was oblivious, digging through his own drawings and notes and putting little odds and ends on the table. Pens, a glass paperweight, a vial of green liquid, a handful of tiny gears spilling from a cloth bag. One was a daguerreotype in a glass fronted case. Tessa took it off the table and turned it over in her hands.

It was an image of five people and she was surprised to recognize almost all of them. Will and Jem standing together, something she'd tried to imagine but had never quite been able to picture clearly. They existed in such separate places for her. This Jem wasn't quite so thin but still ethereal with his light eyes and silver hair. He was well dressed and held a carved cane in one hand. Will stood with his shoulder against Jem's. He hadn't been still and his hair was blurred in the image.

"You're so young," she said and when she wasn't thinking about the words so hard, they flowed more easily. She couldn't put into words, even in her own head where the words still fit together properly, what was so different. This Will didn't really look happier than the one who sat beside her and there weren't so many years between when the picture had been taken and the Will she knew but he was older now. Much older. It wasn't just the shape of his jaw or that his shoulders were broader now than they looked in the image. There was something older about his eyes.

"It was taken a long time ago, before this Mortmain affair had started," Will said looking at it over her shoulder.

"Who's this?" she asked brushing her finger over the glass above the blonde girl's face. She was incredibly pretty.

"Jessie, Jessamine Lovelace," Will said. "She would hardly have been seen in public with the rest of us but she couldn't resist sitting for a portrait." Tessa couldn't tell from him tone if he was fond of her or not. The little half smile made her think that either way, Jessie was gone.

"And Charlotte," Tessa said. Henry reached out and took the picture back. He said nothing and he took it quite gently but it was a clear signal to end the conversation. He didn't stop what he was doing. He just took it back and put it face down on the table.

"I didn't tell you," she said looking at Henry with her eyebrows drawn together. Henry didn't look up, assuming she was talking to Will or lost in his diagrams and the papers that Magnus had passed to him.

"Excuse us, a moment," Will said and waved her out of the room.

In the empty parlour, he took a deep breath as though steeling himself for something. The room was dusty but sunny and it had once been well decorated. The wainscoting was painted white. There were spots on the walls where paintings had hung. It was like an empty echo of a home.

"Henry doesn't need to know anything about Charlotte," Will said. "She died the day of the attack and he has always blamed himself for it. She went to answer the door and we never saw her again. Henry hadn't even come up from his laboratory. He was down below the building, it was solid stone, you can't hear anything down there. He was there the entire time while everyone else..." Will looked away and then back again, "He has never forgiven himself for it. He doesn't need to know what you know. Please."

"I saw her," Tessa said.

"When?" Will asked.

"Before I left," she was thinking about the words again and they were halting. She closed her eyes to block out all the distractions. "Richard found a passage. There was a room. He has more prisoners."

Will didn't respond and she opened her eyes, prepared for him to be angry. The expression on his face was not anger. It was deeper and more pained than that. If Jem had looked at her like that she would have put her arms around him and held on. Will though, she didn't know how to act with Will. He didn't seem the type of person she could hug. She reached out and took his hand.

"She's alive?" Will asked in a whisper as though the touch had brought him back to himself.

She nodded.

"Is she human?" Will asked.

Tessa closed her eyes again. He was too vulnerable in that moment to look at directly. This meant as much to him as Jem did.

"Yes,” she'd planned to force out the rest of the story but she couldn't say it. Will didn’t have time to press for details. The girl who had come with Henry stuck her head out of the room and frowned at Tessa and Will who were standing very close together. Tessa took a half step back even though nothing had been happening.

“Don’t tell him,” Will said in a low voice before he followed Rachel back into the room. “Not here and now with all those other people in the room. Let me tell him later.”

Magnus and Henry were passing papers back and forth and talking into and over each other. Tessa stopped and Will cocked his head the side as though they were doing something absurd. The girl who had brought them back in returned the look and Will cracked a half smile at her which made her light up. Tessa didn’t think Will had noticed but maybe he was used to girls falling in love with him.

“The automatons have demonic energy sealed inside them,” Henry said brightly to Will.

“Yes, that’s why he took the Pyxis,” Will said as he sat and looked at Henry, still a little baffled. “It also explains why they’re so bad at charades. Demons are terrible at charades.”

Tessa cracked a smile without really intending to. He noticed and looked just a little smug. She remembered his promise to make her laugh and smiled at him instead of the joke. Across the room, Rachel gave her another not-so-friendly look.

“Yes, quite,” Henry said completely missing the little byplay.

“I’ve often wondered why they don’t turn on him. Demons don’t like to be bossed around and if half the rumours are true, there were greater demons in that pyxis,” Magnus said. “This explains it.”

“You see, the demonic energies are sealed into the automaton bodies with the spell here,” Henry pointed it out on the diagram.

“But the spell also ties the existence of the demon to Mortmain’s life force,” Magnus continued. The explanation bounced between them like a ball being thrown back and forth.

“So if we can kill Mortmain, the entire army should deactivate as the demonic energies are released,” Henry finished.

“So all we have to do is kill the most well protected man in England,” Will said sarcasm heavy in his voice, “Not a problem.” 


	14. Nothing About You

* * *

William Herondale

October 29, 1882

* * *

 

Early in the morning of October 29th, Mortmain called a little public presentation. It was called under the aegis of Benedict Lightwood and his little band of Shadowhunters and was held in the public space in front of the Institute. Once the gates with their inscription about dust and shadows had marked beginning of the controlled realm of the Nephilim. These days that courtyard was a space that much of Downworld was invited into for these public meetings. It was a place to see and be seen by the types of people who could aid the social mobility of an enterprising new talent.

Will wasn't there but there were those from the resistance who were. Margaret Townsend and Rupert Blackthorn were both in attendance. They weren't stupid enough to be part of the crowd. They were no where near the warding of the Institute which might react to their presence. Gideon claimed that the magic of the Institute could tell that something was wrong and the warding sometimes behaved strangely for no discernible reason, as though the Institute itself knew it housed traitors.

Gideon himself was a part of the crowd, as was his brother and his father. They did not know what Mortmain wanted this little gathering for but they'd put out the word that something was going to happen and the crowd had assembled itself. The air was alive with idle chatter and speculation.

Gabriel and Gideon stood, close together but not speaking. They rarely spoke these days. Their eyes sometimes met over dinner tables or meetings with their father and there was a flash of their old closeness. A shared exasperation at their father's new found desire to find them suitably married and settled or the shared grief at a mention of their lost family members.

The carriage was one of Mortmain's. Metal horses trotted in a technically perfect gait. They were shining and beautiful but had none of the grace of a true horse. They drew the black carriage with the Pandemonium Club's seal on it into the courtyard. An automaton wearing a suit but no skin, stepped down from the driver's seat and opened its metal mouth.

"Something has been stolen from the Magister. It must be returned. The Nephilim will suffer if this does not come to pass," the creature's voice was amplified. Those watching from a distance would not have needed the careful application of runes for hearing and acuity to hear this speech.

"Because we haven't suffered already?" Margaret said sitting, glamoured, on a rooftop down the street. She wore gear and a stern expression. She rarely wore anything else.

Mortmain was something of a showman and in the long silent pause after the declaration no one moved. It wasn't over and they all knew it. The carriage door opened and a figure in a dress was pulled out. Even from a distance the runes on her hands and arms were visible.

"Who the hell is that?" Rupert asked and turned to grab the sleeve of one of the men standing nearby, "Find out if anyone went missing in the last week. Go." They knew all the shadowhunters in the city. News of a missing woman should have reached them by then. But this person hadn’t gone missing in the last week, she’d gone missing over four years ago. She had been presumed dead in the attack that had killed almost her entire family.

She identified herself when she straightened and called, "Father!"

It was the last thing that Tatiana Blackthorn ever said.

 

* * *

 

Will had spent much of the last three days in Tessa's company. She wore plain dresses that Sophie had found for her and did little more than braid her hair. It didn't make her less beautiful. The removal of the spell had returned her ability to eat full meals and she took more pleasure than Will could have imagined in the plain foods that the resistance was able to provide.

"It's bread and butter," Will said to her.

"And an apple," she had said holding up the fruit for him to see. "And tea, I love tea."

"This is possibly the least interesting thing a person could eat," he said.

"I've been hungry for years," she said looking at him and the humour in her eyes cooled, "I ate and then felt ill. Everything. I never ate enough. I am enjoying this bread." She held it up and took a bite to show him that she meant it. Her lips were very distracting when she did things like that.

She sometimes got lost in her sentences but she was getting better at tying her thoughts together and Will could listen to her for hours. Although she didn't have the confidence for that yet. She would withdraw and he'd be left to wonder what he had asked or said that had been wrong. He convinced her to read aloud once because he thought it might help her get more comfortable forming words without having to think about what to say next.

She had read him the first few pages of A Tale of Two Cities in a slow clear voice and he decided maybe the story wasn't quite the sentimental drivel he'd assumed it to be. She didn't look at him while she read so he could watch the way her eyes followed the words and her fingers pinched the corner of the page before she turned it.

They spoke of Jem. Will could finally ask questions and get full answers. He didn't like most of them. Jem's field of broken blood bottles was terrifying to him. It was the least Jem-like thing he could imagine. The willful destruction, violence and mess of it. Tessa was unsurprised that Jem could have that kind of rage in him. In some ways she saw him differently than Will ever had but she also saw Jem in a way that Will had thought no one else ever would.

"He's better," she said, "He's not just better than that place, he's better than most people. People aren't good like that. He's lost everything and he still makes jokes. People can't lose everything and still be that kind. He's even kind to me."

"He's kind to me too," Will said, "At least you deserve it."

Every time he said something like that she would look away as though he’d said something deeply embarrassing.

Sophie and Will were both at the house with her. Sophie had been a lady's maid once. Will knew that piece of information but it always escaped his mind. Sophie was the mother figure to the Nephilim orphans. She was the organizing force that kept the resistance running behind the scenes. She was one of his very few friends. But she also knew how to put a lady's hair up and had convinced Tessa to let her.

In a proper household, a man would not sit in the same room as a lady getting ready for the day but this was hardly a proper household and it was mid afternoon. They were comparing notes about the cave and it's possible location. Will had a theory about the Scottish Highlands that Sophie soundly refuted while she worked. Tessa sat in a rickety wooden chair and Sophie fussed with brushes and pins and a sprig of little white flowers she'd picked up from a girl selling them on the street.

"I'm not sure I've ever had my hair up without a reason before," Tessa said.

Will could see the way that comments like that affected Sophie. Magnus had accused him of being protective of her but Sophie had the same look on her face that she turned on the resistance leaders when they suggested anything that might put the children in danger. It was Sophie who first noticed the very faint scars that ran down the side of her neck and though she and Will had discussed them, neither of them had asked Tessa.

They were teeth marks, vampire bites. They were all but invisible but now that he had noticed them, he could not avoid them. When she tilted her head back to talk to Sophie he could see the paler scar tissue and a dark feeling in the pit of his stomach tried to make itself heard. Jem wouldn't.

His thoughts were interrupted by the front door being slammed open. Tessa had been examining her hair in a little mirror Sophie had brought along for the project and she fell still. The appreciation, the smile, the confident little tilt of her chin, all vanished. Rupert slammed through the inner door. Before Will could react he had grabbed Tessa's arm and swung her back against the wall. The window beside them rattled and Sophie screamed. Tessa didn't so much as blink. Stillness settled over her.

"My wife was in that hell hole and you didn't tell me?" he growled at her.

"There wasn't time to get a list of names," Tessa said and her voice wasn't nearly as calm as her face. "I don't know them all. Charlotte, a girl named Sarah, maybe an Alice. There wasn't time."

"Release her, right now," Will said crossing the room. Tessa's eyes shot to him and they were calm and empty. He refused to let himself think about how she'd learned to take being slammed into a wall without flinching.

"Fuck off, Herondale," Rupert said. "She's dead." Tessa looked back at Rupert but it wasn't a threat. It was a fact. He said it in a flat voice. His fingers still bit into her arm.

"Tatiana?" Will asked getting closer.

"He sent her as a message. He wants you back," he pushed Tessa back against the wall a little harder. "Or he will send us another body."

He sounded dispassionate but his entire body was rigid the the rage of it. He held the rage in check for another moment before it spilled over, "She has been alive for four years, she has been alive and now she's dead because you broke this little whore out."

The comment cracked Tessa's stillness. Emotion came back to her face. Anger that matched Rupert's. One of her arms was being held cruelly tight but the other was free. She slapped him. He reeled back a half step and she shoved him in the center of his chest pushing him back again.

He released her. For a second it looked like she would follow him and hit him again but she backed away instead. Will saw the thoughts cross her face and the way her lips trembled with the effort of trying to form the words she wanted to say. Whatever it had been, she didn't say it. The anger dropped. Like a mask she'd been holding. It just fell away and sadness took its place.

"I am so sorry," she said in a heavy voice.

"She deserved better than that," Rupert told her, "She was gentle and beautiful. We had a son. He didn't survive the attack. We were supposed to grow old together. Raise our children. Now she's dead on the steps of the Institute at the feet of her miserable father. He didn’t even touch her. Her brothers had to carry the body. She’s dead because-"

"Because Mortmain is a monster," Sophie said stepping in to take Tessa's arm and draw her a little further from Rupert's rage and sorrow.

"I need to go back," Tessa said and her face emptied again.

"No," both Will and Sophie said, their objections overlapping.

"There are 15 women there," she said. "More if they're right about what he wants them to do. He won't kill me. He'll kill them."

"Are you sure about that?" Will asked sarcasm crept into his voice and as much as hated it, he couldn't stop it. The idea of sending her back was not acceptable.

"I've escaped three times before," Tessa said, "I've never made it this far before but I know he won't kill me."

"He'll hurt you," Will said and this time the sarcasm stayed away.

"I can survive that," she told him which made the unacceptable answer even worse.

"He'll negotiate for you," Rupert cut back into the conversation.

"That's a risk," Will said but his mind was already turning over possibilities.

"Yes, he will," Tessa said.

"We force him to negotiate," Rupert said. “We force him out into the open and destroy him. When he dies his army dies with him.”

 

* * *

 

Sophie left with Rupert to keep him from doing something stupid. Will was left with Tessa who had curled herself up on the sofa. She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked anywhere but at him. He sat down beside her not close enough to touch her but nearby.

"I would like to apologize for Rupert," he said.

"You needn't," she said finally looking at him, "He was angry and had every right to be."

"He had no right be treat you like that," Will told her.

She didn't respond to that.

"I'm not," she said. "His whore. I'm not."

"I know that," Will said.

"He's never done … that. The marriage isn't complete until the spell is and a warlock told him that if he consummates the marriage before it is complete, it might ruin it." she said. "It might be a lie but if it is the kindest lie that anyone has ever told for me."

It was Will's turn to have nothing to say. His immediate response to the entire topic involved punching things but he didn't think she'd appreciate that.

"I hadn't intended to fight him like this," Tessa said. "I had no where to go. My aunt was dead. My brother was dead. I'm an abomination not any one thing." Will started to argue but she was still speaking. Her voice soft and slow but she spoke with more ease than he had heard from her before so he forced himself to remain silent as she continued, "But when the spell was started. I couldn't. I just couldn't. Magic like that, you can feel it. It gets inside you. Nate tried to convince me that marrying him was the best choice but it couldn't be. I know I'll never be loved but it will be better to be alone than with him."

"Of course you'll be loved," Will said.

She gave him a tiny smile and went to stand by the window. She was a narrow silhouette against the dirty glass. With her hair up, she looked older. She was a young lady instead of a girl. There were so many things she should have had and would never get.

"Do you really believe that?" he asked following her.

"That I'm better alone?" she asked.

"That no one can love you," he said. He didn't tell her that he used to believe that too. That he had spent so long and ruined so much believing that.

"I am not a human. I am not a Shadowhunter. I am not even truly a warlock. I am skinny and strange and scarred. I have no family or money or even a home. I've been so close to so much evil it must have sunk into me by now. Who would want that?" she said turning away from him a little more squarely as though embarrassed to have said it.

"There is nothing about you that is evil," Will said, touching her shoulder with just his finger tips. She didn't pull away and he turned her toward him. Her gray eyes met his for a just a moment before she looked down again. There were no emotions on her face. He couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger or something else that kept her from looking at him.

"I killed those vampires on the roof. How many of them died because of me?" she said.

"They would have beat you senseless and dragged you back to him. They would have killed me. You saved my life, twice," he told her, "There is nothing about you that is evil. I will say it again if you wish. There is nothing about you that is evil." She gave him just a flicker of a smile. "There is also nothing about you that is not beautiful. And I say that having seen you blood soaked, soot streaked and dressed as a boy. But that is not why you are worthy of love."

Her face was very serious but she looked at him directly. He caught her face between his hands and held her still. She blinked rapidly in surprise at the contact before settling. Her skin was warm and soft under his fingers. As much as he wanted to he didn't run his hands over her cheeks, down her neck and back into her hair. He held her gently so she could step away if she wanted to. She didn’t move.

"You are worthy of love because you are strong and brave and kinder than you need be. Even when everything else is terrible, you are kind. You are kind to a prisoner with broken legs and a terrible temper. You are kind to a vampire who used to be a Shadowhunter boy. You are kind to bloody Rupert Blackthorn after he tries to break your arm. Most people would be broken having lived through a fraction of what you have and you are still whole," he said.

She didn't cry this time but did lean into him again as she had done at Magnus's. Her arms came up around his neck and he pulled her in close. There were so many words he wanted to say to her but he smothered them and tried to be the friend she needed.  


	15. All in One Day

* * *

James Carstairs

November 2, 1882

* * *

 

Jem sat on Tessa's bed and held her notebook between his hands. He was breathing because the room smelled like her and each inhalation brought the scent of her back to him. It was a physical thing, the smell of her. Before, he had gone months without seeing her but those had always been months spent in the cage. These last few weeks, he had been moving through the fortress, travelling further than he had been able to before. It was Charlotte or one of the other girls who opened the doors and it was their voices that filled the spaces. He missed Tessa more in spaces that he considered hers.

"Do you need anything else?" Charlotte asked from the doorway. Jem had heard her footfalls and her breathing, and had smelled her before she'd made it to the door but she still startled him. She was a Shadowhunter and she didn't smell the same as the werewolves or Tessa. It was strange to be able to tell by scent alone. He wondered what a mundane or a faerie would smell like.

"No," he said but he lingered another moment before he pushed himself up. He had the notebook and one of her scarves buried in his pocket because he needed the memento and maybe it would hold her scent a little while.

"She's a brave young woman," Charlotte said.

"She's incredible, unlike anyone else I've ever met," Jem said.

"Should you need me to chaperon when you take her courting, do inform me," Charlotte said and Jem laughed at first because it was a delightful idea and then the laughter changed because it was a heart wrenching impossibility. He tried to call up an image to go with that. Charlotte walking with them through a park while they talked or sitting off to the corner of a drawing room to make sure nothing untoward happened. He could imagine Tessa dressed up for it but in all his imaginings he was just as ragged as he was now.

"Did you speak with Katherine?" Jem asked.

"She is adamant that she will remain where she is," Charlotte said.

"She spoke to you?" Jem was shocked by the idea of the silent vampire saying anything.

"No, but she continues to refuse to leave her cage and flinches when approached," she said, "Aloysius told me what a disappointment and a monster my father was and tried to bite Alice. When he is lucid he does seem apologetic but he is so rarely lucid. I don't want to leave him behind but he can't seem to manage his impulses. I suspect that is what Katherine fears as well, that she will hurt someone. You're confident that you will not."

"Blood is much like yin fen, necessary and dangerous," he told her. He didn't tell her that he had practice learning to to manage the need. He didn't tell her about sitting beside Tessa back before the cage could be opened and memorizing her scent until he could put his mouth against the skin of her hand or her wrist without the need to bite down taking over. Older vampires managed these things easily. He had practiced until he had learned it. Charlotte gave him a look that told him that she had a pretty good idea of how he'd gotten so comfortable managing his cravings but she didn't push it. He didn't volunteer the information.

They closed Tessa's ransacked wardrobe and the bedroom door then relocked the main door. Standing in the hallway Charlotte looked over the assembled collection of Shadowhunters. The group was smaller than it should have been. The women in the room upstairs had been 'reorganized' and a few of them had not returned.

Those who remained were here. Jem knew some of them and had learned the names of the others. Some of them wore Tessa's clothes, others still wore their ragged clothing. They carried bags packed with food. The two automatons in the kitchen had been hacked apart with makeshift weaponry in a brief but loud battle of clattering pans and metallic screeching. They had not been animated with the demon spirits and were simply bespelled and they had no weaponry. It still had been almost impossible and the two women who had led the offensive were still wearing their bruises as the iratzes worked. They had enough food for a few weeks but they would need to find more.

They were leaving. There wasn't a way out of the fortress but from the upper floor there were more connecting passageways leading out into empty spaces that obviously hadn't been inhabited recently. It was big enough that they would have a chance to keep ahead of the automatons. If another reorganization came then more prisoners would disappear. Leaving was inadvisable but after years in cages, any action that brought them closer to freedom seemed worth it.

If they climbed high enough through the caves, eventually they had to reach the surface but it wasn’t possible to travel that far and still make it back to the cages in time for the automatons to do their patrol. With a few days to explore, they might be able to make it outside.

Jem squeezed the little book in his pocket with a silent promise to come back and check because eventually she would be back and he couldn't imagine her opening the door to find that everyone else had left her behind.

 

* * *

Henry Branwell

November 2, 1882

* * *

 

Henry Branwell sat with the daguerreotype in hand and looked at the image under the glass. He’d been doing the same thing for most of the last hour. Will had left and he was alone in the laboratory. The sound of the children chasing each other on the floor above him might have been comforting if he had noticed it.

Charlotte looked serious but happy in the photo. She wasn’t smiling but there was an upturn to her lips and her eyes were warm. He looked around the room and then back at the image. Charlotte had had that look in her eye when she’d kissed him that morning before he’d gone down the crypt for just a moment before breakfast. She hadn’t chased him when he hadn’t come up, she’d only sent Sophie down to drop off a plate of toast.

He shook thoughts of that morning off.

Charlotte was not dead.

Will’s spy girl had seen her, talked to her, given her a stele so she could escape her cage.

Henry stood up and put the photograph back on the table, not face down as he usually did after one of these staring matches with the dead but on its little stand. Charlotte and Jem and the others looked out of the image and he turned it as though they could see what he was doing as he cleared a table. They weren’t dead. He pulled out a long forgotten project and spread a plan across the rough wood. If they weren’t dead, there was a chance that this might help them.

He sat down with a pencil and hand and started to work out the problems that had plagued this plan since the beginning.

 

* * *

Gideon Lightwood

November 2, 1882

* * *

 

Gideon stood beside his brother, shoulder to shoulder and watched his father rant and rave. Benedict had always been a man with a temper but in the last few years his tempers had become increasingly volatile. As he raised his hand to throw the glass in it, Gideon saw the dark band below the tightly buttoned cuffs of his shirt. Gideon had theories but now was not the time for them. The glass shattered against the wall and the remains of the expensive imported whiskey dripped down the wall paper as Benedict spun on the two of them.

"He held her and he killed her," he said.

"Well, he's hardly a nice man," Gabriel sneered. The sarcasm surprised Gideon. Gabriel did not argue with their father either in his presence or out of it. Gabriel closed his eyes and his brother expected apologies to come next. Instead, Gabriel said, "Would it be better if it had been some other Shadowhunter girl?"

"If Tatiana were still alive, yes, it would be an improvement. All I do, I do to protect this family," Benedict said, "He probably held her in that Idris hell hole for all these years."

"What was that?" Gideon asked. Idris?

"Four years, Gideon, your sister was imprisoned for four years," Benedict picked up the next nearest object and threw that too. It was a carved stone paperweight that dented the wall before falling to the ground with a clunk.

"There are others there," Gabriel said. "Do we not have a responsibility to them? We are here to negotiate with the so-called Magister on behalf of the Nephilim. What are you going to do about this?"

What Benedict was going to do about it was throw more breakable objects at walls and after a few more minutes of incoherent rage his sons left him and closed the door.

In the long hallway outside the room Benedict had claimed as his study, Gabriel turned to his brother as though he were about to say something but grimaced and turned instead. His long tall figure was tightly coiled rage as he stomped away. Gideon wondered what sort of man his brother might have become if their world hadn’t fallen to pieces or if he hadn't been so fiercely devoted to their father and his ideals.

Gideon drew himself back together. He would be better than his father was and he would begin it by doing what his father couldn't. He went downstairs to start making arrangements for his sister's funeral before he could sit and write a letter requesting a meeting with Sophie.

 

* * *

Magnus Bane

November 2, 1882

* * *

 

Magnus sat in Will Herondale's little lair and listened to the Shadowhunters discuss how they would go about killing Mortmain when he showed up for this meeting. Sometimes he informed them that they were being particularly stupid but mostly he sat and he listened and he let himself hope, just a little, that there might be an end to all this. If Mortmain died, the automatons died with him and once they were so much scrap metal, things would be different. Magnus was ready for different. In centuries, he'd seen few spans of years as bad as the last four years had been for London.

During a break between the rounds of arguments, Magnus stepped outside to stand on the step leading down to the tiny courtyard that the house shared with a few others. It was weedy and overgrown. A little purple flower pushed up between two cobblestones and Magnus considered stepping out the circle of the warding just to get a closer look at it. Life pushing between stones.

Tessa Gray appeared at the door and then at his elbow. She was stronger and brighter than she had been when Will had shown up with her on Magnus's doorstep. She wore a brown dress and had her hair twisted up in a plain but attractive chignon. Plain in all ways and yet interesting and then suddenly beautiful when she smiled. Magnus was struck again by how different she was from Will and how she still reminded him of the Nephilim boy.  It might have been the sense of goodness buried under years of heavy defenses or the sharp eyes that saw more than they let on.

"May I ask you a question?" she said.

"I don't promise to answer but you may ask anything you like," he said.

"You may not want to answer this one," she said.

"Ask it and I'll decide," he said.

"I am a warlock. My father was a demon. My mother was a Shadowhunter but my father was a demon. I know many warlocks. Mortmain employs them as tutors and invites them as friends and holds parties for them. He was raised by warlocks," she said.

"I've heard that," Magnus said turning to look at her. This was not an idle question. Her face was serious but not a mask as it had been inside while she'd listened to the theories and the plans bouncing around the assembled Shadowhunters. There was worry in her eyes.

"You're a good man," she said it like a declaration and Magnus was taken aback. People, particularly Nephilim people, did not declare things like that about him.

"Not particularly but perhaps better than some," he said. She studied him as though trying to decide if what she was about to say was the right choice. He tried to look like a good man. He was curious now. He told himself that that was it. Though he had to admit that he liked people declaring him to be fundamentally good.

"Do warlocks have souls?" she asked him.

"Do you doubt that you have a soul?" he asked.

"Every other warlock I have met is either cold or cruel or both. As I am a warlock, I will likely live for hundreds of years. I worry that if I ever did have a soul, I will age out of it. Once I have lived out the span of a human life, I will start to become strange and cold and cruel. Maybe I already am," she said. A tiny line between her forehead and a tightness in her lips were the only evidence of the concern in every word. Her voice was steadier than it had been a week ago but she could hide nothing in her tone. Perhaps, he was underestimating her, maybe she chose to hide nothing.

Magnus took her by the shoulders and returned the studious look. She met his gaze without flinching from the sheen of the cat's eyes like so many did. He took a deep breath and said, "Strange is part of what we are. We are all strange and the older you become the stranger you will find yourself. Cold and cruel are not given. Many warlocks become cold, they forget how to love, they forget how to hate, they forget how to enjoy good wine and sunsets and pretty boys with midnight blue eyes. They exist instead of live. And cruelty, well cruelty is always a choice. If there is such a thing as a soul, you have one. Keeping it is the trick but that is up to you, you make those choices, no one else can take it away. Whether you do good for this world is up to you Miss Gray." 

She nodded and surprised him again by kissing him on the cheek before she said, "Thank you," and then turned and went back into the house in a swish of skirts. Magnus lingered a little longer with his little purple flower and the rest of the weeds before going back inside to see if there was anything he could add to this plan. He had every intention of living to be a little older and a little stranger. 


	16. Some Magics Leave A Mark

* * *

 William Herondale

November 3, 1882

* * *

 

Will was on edge but when Tessa put her hand on his arm to point something out, he decided it was worth it. She was wrapped in a traveling cloak with runes inscribed across the lining. It looked normal if a little unnecessary for the weather. It would make her nearly impossible to find with a tracking spell. It was as safe as she could be outside of warding but the possibility of something going wrong tugged on Will’s conscience.

They did not exactly have permission for this little outing. Will hadn't mentioned that to her when he'd dropped the cloak over her shoulders and asked if she would like to join him on a shopping trip. She had been trapped in that house for so long and he was starting to feel like a jailer and the more she didn't complain the more he worried that it was the same sort of acceptance she had for being slammed into walls. A rescue was supposed to make your life better. 

They could still have been seen but she'd fixed that problem by changing. She was now a pretty mundane girl with a round face and red curls. Her brown eyes were no longer Tessa's but Will imagined that if he had both Tessa and the owner of that face there he would have been able to tell the difference.

He asked her questions about the change. The girl was named Molly Walker and Tessa had changed into her before as part of her training and so it was repeatable. She didn't elaborate on that but Will knew enough from the letters to know that it probably wasn't a pleasant memory. She did the change easily and it seemed to cause her no pain. She had even smirked at him when he’d been impressed.

"If I went and stole something from that warlock there, could you turn into him?" he asked her.

"Yes, but warlock changes aren't as easy," she said with a shudder that he didn't follow up on.

"But you would even have the horns?" Will asked.

"I would, yes, or the claws from that woman there," she said. The woman with the claws was walking ahead of them and when she lost a hat pin, Will scooped it up and passed it Tessa.

"Is that enough?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "But I shan't do it here. It would be rather noticeable, especially as she is quite thin and my dress would fall right off."

"Perhaps not the best choice for an afternoon stroll then," Will said. She pocketed the hat pin and accepted his arm when he offered it.

She smiled more easily just for being outside but the crowd made her nervous. They were headed to a Downworld shop with a list of things to buy for Magnus’s part of the trap planned for the next day. As they left the more mundane streets behind the crowd was changing. She drew in closer to Will whenever she was startled.

He only did it once but he did steer her by a shop selling faerie animals like the little blue birds hanging in a cage by the window. She looked up at them and one of them flitted up to the bars. Its face split open to reveal a gaping mouth of teeth. It shrieked, high and sharp. Tessa gasped but did not scream. He caught her when she stepped back into him. She had stayed close for a moment before she had seen his smile. He hadn't been able to suppress it.

"You knew those weren't birds!" she accused him and she spoke with the borrowed accent that went with the borrowed face.

"I might have known that, yes," he said. She swatted his shoulder but there was no malice in it. Her red curls bounced as she turned away from him. He had to hurry to catch up to her, still smiling. In the late autumn sunshine, here on the street, Will let himself forget for just a moment everything that had happened and everything that was about to.

Inside the shop, the warlock clerk didn't question Will while he placed the order. The glamour was holding. He hoped it would hold long enough to get them back out again as well. It was better if no one noticed that he was Nephilim and Downworlders were always more likely to see through a glamour no matter how well crafted the spell. The clerk was either fooled or wasn't willing to cause trouble. He went off to start collecting the materials from the back room.

Tessa looked at everything. The dusty shelves. The collections of spell books, organized and labeled. A skull that wasn't human and might or might not be real. She started to reach out to touch a vial and then drew her hand back. She asked Will questions in a whisper about what things were. He only knew a few of the answers. He could listen to her questions all day. When she asked him something, she always looked directly at him. She granted him her full attention and every time she did, he lost track of the rest of the world.

A man came into the shop behind them and Will shifted so he was standing a little closer to Tessa and could keep the man in view. He looked mundane but there was something about him that Will couldn't quite put his finger on. He waited at the counter but the clerk was still in the back putting together Magnus's order. Tessa wasn't paying attention but Will noticed every time the man turned watery eyes on them.

His attention kept returning to Tessa. He was pale and sickly looking with dark circles under his eyes. Will realized what had pricked his attention when the man approached them and he could see partially healed bite marks on his neck. He was a Darkling.

"Who do you serve?" he asked Tessa in a voice that set Will on edge.

"You need not talk to him," Will said to Tessa putting himself just between them.

"You are uninitiated," the Darkling said to Will as though disgusted by such a thing.

"You are leaving," Will said. "Either of your own accord or with my help."

The man was steady and unafraid. Will considered letting slip that he was Nephilim just to up the intimidation but that would have been stupid. Jem’s voice was there in his head, reminding him how stupid. The darkling retreated without further challenge. The door clanged as it swung shut and the shop clerk reappeared at the counter with a parcel.

Will squeezed Tessa's hand before going to check the contents and pay him. She watched him with that eerie stillness that she had when she was nervous. Her attention was no longer on the objects and the labels and the things in the shop. Once the exchange was done, Tessa fell immediately into step at Will's side as they exited onto the street.

"How can he tell? Is Mortmain watching us?" she whispered when they were clear of the shop and back into the relative anonymity of the crowd.

"He wasn't talking about Mortmain," Will said in as even a voice as he could manage. He would maintain his composure.

"I don't understand," she said.

"Let's get back off the street first," he said because the walk back would give him time to organize his thoughts.

 

* * *

 

Back in the same little sitting room that Tessa had been trapped in for days, Will dumped the parcel in an armchair and sat down with her. She was herself again. He didn't remember when she had changed back. The hairstyle didn't hold as well and her less tightly curled brown hair was slipping loose around her face. He pushed a piece back and then took her hand.

"It's something bad," she said. "Who was the man in the shop?"

"He was a darkling," Will said. She shook her head to show him that she didn't understand what he meant. "Vampires, when they feed their own blood to someone can create a darkling who is connected to them, who serves them and can eventually become a vampire themselves."

"He thought that's what I am?" she said.

"Yes," Will said.

"But I've never drank vampire blood," she said.

"But you've been bitten," he said and his hand moved of its own accord to touch the marks above the collar of her dress. She tensed but didn't pull away from his fingers. "There's magic in vampire bites, to speed healing, to make it hurt less, and it leaves a mark as well. Another vampire can see it and apparently so too can a darkling."

"Will I become a vampire?" she asked. Her hand touched the space his had just left.

"No, not unless you drink a vampire's blood and then die. Being bitten is not enough. But to leave a trace like that, it would have to have been the same vampire more than once. It will fade eventually. It isn’t permanent magic, like getting chalk on your sleeve, it will rub away," he said and the look she gave him was enough to answer the question he had been trying not to ask. Emotions roiled up. Anger and disgust and a bone deep worry for both of them that felt a lot like pain. He heard the words as they came out of his mouth without any conscious thought, "Why would he do that?"

"The first time, he was starving," she said and she told him the story, slowly, in an even voice. Darklings and those who had been held in thrall to vampires always fell within two types. There were those who were zealous and fanatical in defense of their masters and those who were deeply ashamed of it once the compulsion and the effects of the magic had worn away. She was neither. He imagined that if she were to recount the story of helping him out of Mortmain's mansion she would use much the same tone. Perhaps she would not be quite as protective of him as she was when she talked of Jem.

"It had been more than a year that I had been with Mortmain and the Dark Sisters," she said. "He was the first person in all that time who took the time to be kind to me. He untied me. He checked to make sure that my wrists weren't hurt."

"And then he bit you," Will was surprised by his own anger but it didn't stop, "He could have killed you."

"So could you," she said.

"What?" he asked pulling back to look at her. Had he put her in danger? Had he scared her? He started running over the things he had done since they'd met.

"You're stronger than I am, you have weapons, you could kill me right now," she said cutting through his thoughts.

"I would never -" he started but she interrupted him, "I know. Just as I know that Jem wouldn't hurt me."

Will closed his eyes. Jem as a vampire was a theory, an idea. Vampires might be allies or enemies but they were not friends. They were other. Tessa had seen Jem with fangs and blood on his lips and she could still say with complete faith that he would never hurt her. He tried to imagine it. A visual image to go with this idea and couldn't quite assemble it. He could only call to mind the memory of his Jem. Jem as he had been. The anger rose again but not at Jem, at Mortmain for doing that to him.

"Does it hurt?" Will asked touching the faint marks over her collar again. Her skin was warm and smooth and he could feel her pulse below the skin. She shook her head. He stroked the line of marks and met her eyes. Rain water and clearing clouds and Welsh fog. They were eyes he could fall into.

"It doesn't hurt," she said looking down, colour rising in her cheeks. Will's heart twisted at the very idea that she might be able to feel that same pressure that he did. There was a line pulling him in toward her and he wasn't sure he could argue with it. He certainly didn't want to. He hadn't meant to reach for her hand but it was there in his and he ran a thumb over her knuckles, very gently.

Tessa met his eyes again. Her full attention was different this time. The self-contained confidence and curiosity she had when she asked him about London or vials in shops was gone. She looked as unsettled as he felt. For all that, there was no fear. She had said she knew that Jem wouldn't hurt her just as he wouldn't. Will wasn't sure he deserved the faith. Jem had always been the one of them to trust. Hadn't he been the one to make a lifetime out of hurting everyone who might care about him?

Their faces were closer, someone had leaned in and he wasn't sure who it had been. He felt her surprised exhalation against his cheek and it took self control he hadn't thought he had to stay still. He didn't kiss her. He didn't push his fingers into her hair and draw her into him. He didn't trail kisses along her jaw or down her neck. He didn't.

But he wanted to.

She was just far enough away that he could see her mouth move as she started to say something. He didn't let go of her hand but he pulled back until he couldn't smell her hair. It was easier to think when she wasn't so close. The spell didn't break. The line tried to pull him back in but he sat straight, squaring up his shoulders in that way that she did before she did something difficult.

"Will," she started.

"No," he said.

"No?" she asked.

"You have nothing to justify. About any of it," he said, "I apologize. I am well beyond the bounds of propriety. Excuse me."

He kissed her hand as he had the first time he'd come back for her. He let that line hold his lips against her skin for a moment too long before he put her hand down. He placed it on the chair beside her like a breakable object and not a piece of her.

She blinked at him but before she could marshal the words to tell him whatever went with the shocked look on her face, he got up and left the room. Outside, on the porch he could breathe again. He didn't see her frown as she watched him go. He didn't see her touching the spot he had kissed with that blush climbing her neck again. 


	17. Decency and Sanity

* * *

 Gabriel Lightwood

November 4, 1882

* * *

Gabriel Lightwood had his feet up on the arm of the sofa in a well appointed drawing room in fashionable neighbourhood. He was fairly certain that if the owner were present, he would not approve of heavy boots on his upholstery. The owner was upstairs, tucked into his bed with about three hours of unconsciousness left thanks to the potion he had been given. The poor man was hardly in a position to argue with which pieces of furniture the Shadowhunters used.

Gabriel lounged and pretended that he was relaxed and at ease though he felt more like a spring in a clockwork that had been wound too tightly. The last time the younger Lightwood son had felt truly at ease he had been 19 years old. As the younger son, he would not inherit his father's seat on the Council and his father had decided that he must not be left without advantages. At 19, Gabriel had been posted not to an Institute abroad as his brother had been but to Idris. He had been given a posting in the Inquisitor's office in Alicante itself. No one ever asked which favours Benedict Lightwood had called in to make it happen.

Gabriel had resented it and reveled in it in equal measures. He hated the paperwork and the long hours at a desk and he had no interest nor aptitude for law. But he appreciated all his father had done. He was being given a chance to get a leg up in the Clave. Someday, he would run an Institute and then climb the ranks. It was an honour. He just wished the honour hadn't come with so many legal definitions and bundles of memos.

He had been buried in paperwork when a law clerk had arrived at the door to his little closet of an office looking pale. It had been the spring of 1879. The man met Gabriel's green eyes and clenched his hands into fists. Gabriel had a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pen in the other and a scowl on his face.

"London has fallen," the man said.

"What? Did it trip? The entire city?" Gabriel had been in a terrible mood. He had spent the previous 4 hours sorting petitions for reparations and wasn't feeling charitable.

He found out quickly that it wasn't a joke.

The Clave had sent a delegation to London that afternoon. They were to find out what happened to the Institute there. They were to interview the distraught Henry Branwell and the surly William Herondale and prepare a report. It was after they were in the city that the news arrived that the tiny Cornwall Institute had been burned to the ground. News of York followed quickly then Dublin and Edinburgh.

Gabriel had gone with the team to see what was salvagable in York. He had seen the doors ripped off their hinges and the lightning bolt marks of the Starkweather family gouged off of every surface. He hadn't at that time, seen an automaton yet. Will and the surviving maid from the London Institute had described them but it had seemed a fancy.

They had also been the ones to find the Herondale family home. Gabriel had never considered William Herondale having family. He seemed like he had dropped fully formed from some antagonistic cloud, a gift from a vengeful god who wanted to irritate everyone on earth. That he had a mother and a father and sisters was almost unthinkable but Gabriel had seen his family portrait of three children and their smiling parents torn and knocked from the wall. There had been blood soaking into one corner of it where it had landed in a shallow pool of it.

Will hadn't survived long enough for Gabriel or anyone else to tell him the news. He had been gone by the time Gabriel made it back to London. Gabriel never found out what had happened to him.

That made Cecily Herondale was the last of the family and she had her heavy boots up on the fashionable upholstery as well. She had been 16 and mostly dead when Gabriel had first seen her. She'd caught a blade to the side of the head during the attack that had killed her parents. The blow had been glancing - either poorly aimed or she'd ducked out of the way. Her forehead had been split in a long scar that began just below her hairline and reached back to her ear. It had been grotesque but it hadn't damaged the bone. She had made a full recovery under the care of the Silent Brothers.

If she styled her hair carefully, the scar would have been invisible. She never did. Gabriel looked at her. She was watching the street through the window. Her feet in heavy boots were up on the same arm of the sofa that his were but she sat in a nearby armchair. Her hair along the scar had grown in bright white and she brushed it back with the deep black into a tight braid. She was a photograph - two tone hair, black gear, pale skin. If you didn't catch sight of her deep blue eyes you might think her a ghost.

She intimidated him entirely. She was a formidable fighter even without much formal training and she had a quiet intelligence that could lash out if you failed to live up to her standards of what constituted "not an idiot." Gabriel would not admit to the intimidation.

He was a warrior and a man and was not afraid of 19 year old girls.

"How much longer before Townsend's plan happens?" One of the other Shadowhunters, Clinton something or other, asked. Gabriel had been watching Cecily instead of remembering where he was and what he was meant to be doing.

"It's scheduled for 3 in the afternoon, so any moment now," Gabriel answered. "Were there any clues in the message as to what they were doing exactly?"

"Disabling all the automatons," the man shrugged.

The Clave Shadowhunters had all been placed after the London Institute had been reopened. When the Inquisitor had told Gabriel that his father's behaviour was suspect and the Clave needed reports on him, he had been offended and had stormed out of the office. Six weeks later, he had written back to the Inquistor and agreed to pass on anything he saw.

His father had been everything he wanted to be when he was young. His father also allowed Downworlders to congregate on the Institute steps and hosted Axel Mortmain himself for dinner. Memories plagued Gabriel. Memories of the torn apart Blackthorn townhouse where his nephew had died and Cecily's mother's unseeing eyes as her daughter had bled slowly to death beside her. Gabriel attended the dinners and the meetings and hoped that some good could come of it but he no longer believed that his father was right.

But still, each report he sent painted his father as an unwitting pawn, not a traitor. Tatiana's death had put an end to that. Gabriel wasn't going to lie for his father any longer. Perhaps, he could still keep Gideon from being pulled down that same road.

This team of Shadowhunters would search Mortmain's mansion once the automatons were disabled. Gabriel did not know how the automatons could be disabled. He did not know where the attack or the spell was going to happen. He did not know who was a member of the resistance beyond the leadership of Margaret Townsend. He did not know who to punch to make any of that information appear.

“Did your father really say that Mortmain's in Idris?” Clinton asked. Gabriel could not remember his family name. Perhaps Clinton was the family name but that didn’t sound like a Shadowhunter name. He decided he didn't care.

“He did say that, yes,” Gabriel said and it could have been a polite sentence but he layered all his annoyances into those words until they sounded like an insult. Cecily glanced at him.

“Have you considered that your father has lost his sanity entirely?” this came from Sarah Kingsmith who stood by the window.

“My father’s sanity has long since disappeared, along with his decency. Perhaps they have eloped and have gotten a nice little estate in the countryside and that’s why he can watch his daughter bleed to death onto the cobblestones without moving a muscle,” Gabriel said. He did not want to talk about his father. He wanted to talk about anything else but his father.

“Do you think the grounds are well kept?” Cecily asked in the ensuing silence as everyone else backpedaled from Gabriel’s mood.

“Pardon me?” he said frowning at her. She was looking at him directly, something she rarely did, and her face was perfectly serene. No trace of sarcasm nor anything else. A porcelain doll with a pair of swords worn in crisscross scabards at her back.

“My father used to say that you could tell a lot about a gentleman from how he kept his home. Well tended grounds would equate to a well tended mind,” her Welsh accent and her finishing school diction were an unusual combination to Gabriel who had always written the entire population of Wales off as drunken sheep farmers and assholes like William Herondale.

“So I was curious,” she continued, “If you thought a household made up of decency and sanity would be particularly well tended.”

Gabriel stared at her and just an inch of the porcelain mask twitched and he caught the humour in his eyes before she smoothed out the twitch of a smile.

He started to laugh. He hadn’t intended to start to laugh. He had laughed rarely since the final battle with the automatons had pushed the Shadowhunters back through the passage at Westminister Abbey. They had lost. London had fallen. The passage had been sealed to make sure they were not followed. Gabriel hadn’t laughed much since that day. He hadn’t laughed at all since Tatiana had died. Now it tumbled out of him and it wasn’t a particularly nice sound.

“Probably not,” he said when he had regained his composure enough to speak, “I expect that they are painfully understaffed as my father had little of either to begin with.”

“How unfortunate, they should hire a groundskeeper,” Cecily said in the sort of judgemental tone that Tatiana might have used to discuss another lady’s hat. Gabriel’s chest tightened at the memory. Even remembering his sister at her most petty hurt. Cecily was smiling at him, a little half smirk that wouldn’t have looked out of place on her brother’s face. Unpleasant siblings was something they had in common.

“Something’s happening out there,” Sarah interrupted and both Gabriel and Cecily were on their feet and at the window before the sentence was over.

A pack of automatons were marching up the street. In this neighbourhood that wasn’t particularly unusual. Gabriel had even heard mundanes talk of it like it were a perk of living on the street. A mark of progress and Britian’s ingenuity. They didn’t know that each metal man housed a very angry demon. In the years since the first attacks, the automatons had been getting crueler when they were not explicitly controlled. Bodies had show up torn to ribbons, and all evidence said it had happened slowly. Trapped demon spirits spilled over into rage and destruction whenever the leash was loosened.

The leash on these ones must have been very tight as they marched in perfect formation, looking like the clockwork they were on the outside instead of the evil they were on the inside. Gabriel tugged on Cecily’s sleeve and turned to run up the stairs. It was much easier to interact with her during a fight. She immediately understood him and when they reached the upper floor she pushed open the window in the bedroom that faced the street and they both leaned over the rail. A plume of smoke rose in the distance and the sound of stomping metal feet echoed back off the walls of the houses on either side of the road.

“He’s in there,” Cecily said looking at the automatons. She was right. From above it was possible to see that they were carrying a man in the middle of the formation. Protected and invisible to anyone looking at them straight on. What was wrong with him wasn't evident over the distance but he did not move.

“They tried to kill him?” Gabriel couldn’t keep the incredulous tone out of his voice. “That’s like shooting a bear and missing. We will all get mauled. He’s going to tear this city apart to find them.”

“They must have come pretty close,” Cecily said, “He doesn’t look very well.”

“Are you impressed?” Gabriel asked.

“I want the bastard dead,” Cecily told him then she considered the street another moment before turning midnight blue eyes on him, “Us, I don’t want dead. We should probably leave.”

Downstairs Clinton was yelling orders to the same effect. Gabriel stopped his brain from thinking about being part of an Us with Cecily as he followed her back down the stairs and then out the servants’ entrance to the side of the house. He glanced back at the street but couldn’t see the automatons. Cecily smirked at him one more time before she turned to run, following pre-selected routes out of the neighbourhood and back to safety. Gabriel hung back a moment until her two tone hair had disappeared from view before following his own circuitous route back to the Institute.

 

* * *

 

Changed into proper dress for dinner, Gabriel met Gideon in the hallway near the dining room. He didn’t make eye contact. Gideon leaned against a wall and stared at the tapestry across from them. For a moment, they were alone. Sarah Kingsmith would be at dinner as would a few of London’s other official Nephilim. News of what had happened hadn’t reach Gabriel yet, he was still full of questions and antsy with worry.

“You look pleased,” Gabriel said to Gideon's barely contained scowl.

“When will you next be in Idris?” Gideon asked, ignoring the comment.

“I haven’t a clue, when they call me or when father sends me,” Gabriel said. It wouldn’t be any time soon. London was about to burn under Mortmain’s temper and the Clave would want as many Shadowhunters as possible in the city to try and temper the blaze. Then again, maybe they’d call for retreat again and give up on England. He didn’t understand how the Consul made these decisions.

“You should consider going,” Gideon said pushing away from the wall. Gabriel would have said something to that but as his brother turned to walk away, he saw that there was blood soaking through his jacket. The dark brown fabric made it almost invisible but when Gabriel looked, he could see the smear of it on the dark stone wall as well. Before he could assemble the questions to ask what was going on, Gideon was gone.

 


	18. Going Home

* * *

 Tessa Gray

November 4, 1882

* * *

 

Tessa stumbled as Will swung her through the door and slammed it shut behind them. His hand was there on her arm and once she was steady he adjusted her cloak. She held still while he turned to check the room. Long shelves ran in narrow rows, each filled with boxes of supplies. A warehouse of some sort. Tessa couldn’t calm herself enough to read the labels painted on the rough wood. So she watched Will and tried not to think of anything else. He was a tall graceful shadow moving through the shelves, disappearing and reappearing in view.  

She fought against the memories of what had happened on the bridge. Without meaning to, she rubbed her thumb across her palm while tracking Will's footsteps. She counted steps. She watched for his shadow. By the time he made it back to her, her breathing was even again. He touched her. His hands quick as they ran down her arms, squeezing gently. It took her a long moment to understand what he was doing. Injuries, he’s looking for injuries. 

“I’m not hurt,” she told him. “You are.”

When Henry’s devices, mounted on arrow tips, had lodged into the mechanisms of the automatons they had blown them to pieces. Shards of metal had flown thick through the air for a few moments as the archers had exhausted their supply. Will had been far enough back that that couldn’t have been the cause of the blood trickling down from his hairline. Something must have happened after they'd started to run. She reached up to touch him and drew back afraid that her fingers would make it worse. 

“Nothing an iratze won’t fix,” he said. He had meant it to be comforting but all it did was call up memories of his injuries the night they had met. Back then, helping him had been an act of rebellion. Anything that would make Mortmain angry had been worth doing. It hadn’t mattered who he was, only that Mortmain wanted him hurt and Tessa couldn’t stomach anyone else being hurt. 

But now, now he was Will. Will being hurt was different from a man in a dungeon being hurt. Even this much blood made her worry about him. She knew that he didn’t react to pain normally. She'd seen him cracking jokes with both legs broken. She didn’t trust him to tell her if he was truly injured. The force of the wave of protectiveness that rolled through her surprised her. Will wasn't someone who needed protecting but she was starting to realize that that was because he had no one to protect him. He had learned not to ask for help. 

He had pushed the shirt up his arm. She stepped in and picked the stele out of his too tight grip and drew the iratze for him. If he wouldn't ask for help, she wouldn't wait. She could just barely see the dark marks spreading over the pale skin of his forearm.

She held his arm as she did. Every part of him was hard and muscled but the arm in her hand was warm and being able to do this for him made her feel better. At some point in the last week, she couldn’t remember exactly when, touching him had become easy. His hand on her arm was steadying without being embarrassing. His shoulder against hers while the Shadowhunters argued helped her feel grounded and connected. He touched her hair and her hands and her anxieties eased. She wasn't a freak or an interloper with Will at her side. 

“This wasn’t the plan, Will,” she said. His face darkened but he said nothing. She put her hand on his. He looked at her scraped knuckles and his jaw worked to swallow down some emotion. 

“This wasn’t the plan,” she repeated, “If it didn’t work, you were supposed to turn me in. I need to go back.” 

“No. That isn’t acceptable. You are not going back,” he said. 

“He won’t kill me. I won’t accept my freedom at the cost of someone else’s life, I won’t,” she said. 

He braced a hand on either side of her. She stood with her back to a brick wall, in the fading light from the windows his eyes were almost black against his pale skin and his near perfect features. He held himself away from her, an arm length between them. His elbows were locked and his face wasn’t kind. She blinked slowly and found the little scar on his jaw, the faint freckles across the bridge of his nose, the way his lower lip was just a little fuller than the upper one. Tiny imperfections that reminded her that he was a person too. Not some warrior god but a boy who missed his family and his best friend.

“You matter, your life is not some chip in a poker game to be passed around and bet on some bluff,” he said. 

“It isn’t a bluff,” she said. “And he won’t kill me.”

“I don’t care,” he said. 

“Yes, you do,” she told him. “What if the next person they kill is Charlotte? What if it’s Jem?” She couldn’t dwell on that thought. She regretted throwing it at him but it haunted her and she couldn’t imagine that it didn’t haunt him as well. In that they understood each other. She had thought no one else would ever worry about Jem like she did but that was before she met Will. 

His eyes fell shut and he hung his head. His tangle of black hair obscured his expression but she could feel it coming off of him in waves. He pulled her into an embrace and it was unlike anything she’d felt before. It wasn’t like Mortmain touching her to remind her that she was a thing he owned. It wasn’t like Jem cradling her close like his arms could build a home just by holding her. 

No. This was like being caught in the center of a storm. In that moment Will wasn’t so much a person as a barely contained hurricane. There were tremors in his fingers and his heart was racing. She could feel him inhale each time he started to say something and his breath stirred her hair when he let it out in a sigh instead. 

She pulled him close, holding as tightly to him as he held to her. Her arms around his neck and her fingers running through the strands of his hair. He pressed his face against her neck and the warmth of him there, his breathing against the space Jem had once put his teeth sent a shudder through her. 

He pulled back and caught her face between his hands. He was so close that she could have counted his eye lashes even in the shadows of the storeroom. She was sure for a moment that this time he would kiss her. Instead he closed his eyes and let out a torrent of words that she didn’t understand. The cadence of the language was familiar but unplaceable. 

“Dw i’n dy garu di,” he said and then repeated it but the syllables meant nothing to her. 

“I can’t lose you,” he said in English. 

“Oh Will,” she said because she had no other words. She kissed his forehead, his eyelids when his eyes fluttered shut, his cheek and she stopped there. Their faces were so close together. She felt his lips move against her cheek, close to her ear, when he whispered, “Please stay.” 

She pushed him back gently so that she could look him in the face. One of his hands curved around her neck, the other held her waist. He read her face and his expression crumbled. He knew that she was right. The failure on the bridge had backed them into a corner. This was the only option that didn’t end with another dead Shadowhunter. 

“Stay a little longer,” he said, “Not yet, don’t leave yet.”

She didn’t say anything but she pulled him back in and wrapped her arms around him again. The storm was still there beneath his skin. Fury and horror and sadness. She hadn’t known she could cause someone that kind of pain and there was nothing to fix it. He pulled her with him down to lean against a corner behind a wall of crates. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart while he pushed those shaking fingers through her hair.

“Tell me a story,” she said to him when the feeling of being pressed up against a hurricane had eased enough that it felt possible to talk. It was dark now. The warehouse windows glowed faintly but there was no light in their little corner. She could no longer see him at all but she could feel his breathing and each little movement. 

“A story?” he asked. 

“Something happy,” she said spreading the cloak with its lining of runes a little wider so that it covered them like a blanket. They could pretend not to exist for a few hours. Untraceable by magic and hidden by the dark from anyone walking by. 

Will told her a story involving Jem and feeding pies to ducks that made her smile. Then, in a different voice, he told her a story about his sisters and the land surrounding their house in Wales. His accent was different when he spoke of his childhood home and the Welsh words appeared in the story as he told it. She finally placed the cadence of the language he had been speaking. She could have told him then but she didn’t because it would have interrupted the story. 

His warmth had made her flinch the first time he'd held her close, reminding her too much of Mortmain’s hands. Now it was just a part of Will. He felt like Will. He created this little space that was warm and kind and safe. She drifted to sleep held close to him. 

* * *

It was still black when she blinked awake again. His breathing was slow and even, whatever had woken her hadn’t done the same to him. She couldn’t see more than vague shapes through the gloom but after untangling she stopped to look down at him and imagine that she could see his face. She put the arm that had been draped around her shoulders back on his chest and touched his hair. He stirred very faintly under her hand. 

He had saved her. He wouldn’t see it that way, she knew that, but he had. He had given her that stele and an ability to send messages beyond herself. He had reached out a hand and pulled her back into the world. Jem had kept her from losing herself in the dark but Will had given her a light to follow back. 

“Thank you, William,” she whispered to the dark and he still didn’t wake. If he did, she would have to argue with him. She lingered. It would be easier to leave if he didn’t wake but she wanted him to wake up and tell her some other solution. 

“There is no other solution,” she whispered aloud. If she heard it, maybe she would stop wishing on stars that wouldn’t answer. She pushed herself to her feet and then tiptoed through the warehouse until she found the office where she found a shipping manifest that was blank on the back. By the light of the gaslamps through the dirty windows she wrote him a note. Her handwriting was shaky and uneven after so long in disuse but it was readable. 

Back in the warehouse she tucked it into his hand and kissed him on the forehead one last time. 

Then she left with nothing but the cloak, the clockwork angel she could not remove and the hat pin that Will had picked up from the warlock on the street. She headed out into the London night and followed the path of destruction back to where the first automatons had blown apart. 

In the centre of Blackfriars' bridge was a space that was clear of debris. Magnus’s spell had started to rub away from the pavement already. There were spaces where the magic was still active but in other places the runes were smears. She had removed the cloak and folded it carefully. She'd left it behind in front of the shop where Will had shown her the little blue bird with their razor teeth. 

Tessa Gray, warlock, shadowhunter, ruin of the Nephilim stepped into the empty space wearing the dress that Sophie had given her. She sat down on the ground, smoothing the fabric around her into a circle of blue against the gray. 

She waited for the person she least wanted to see to send someone to pick her up. 

* * *

Before the sun came up she was locked in a room so very like the one where she had first seen Will. A few hours later, when she was finally left alone, she held her broken fingers as still as possible so they wouldn't hurt more than they had to and she started practicing. 


	19. Mortmain's Deal

 

* * *

 James Carstairs

November 4, 1882

* * *

 

Time had never meant much inside the walls of the fortress. Time was measured in meals and visits with Tessa. The werewolves could count out lunar cycles giving them a sense of how many months passed. Jem sometimes imagined he could feel the pull of night and day but it never quite resolved itself into something reliable. Vampires were nocturnal and sometimes he could feel the drag on his energy that came with sunrise. Other times it didn't affect him though he knew that hours were passing and dawn should have come.

Jem estimated it had been only a day since they'd left behind their prisons and set out. They'd stopped to sleep twice, two different shifts. Both times in rooms with multiple exits in case they needed to run. Pursuit hadn't come for them yet. The halls were empty. There were no clanging footfalls. No hissing demonic voices coming from metal throats. No one was searching for them. Yet.

Finding vents to climb became easier as they moved higher. The fissures that ran through the rocks were larger and less polished up here. It was difficult climbing but not impossible. Jem took unreasonable pride in being good at it. His balance had always been excellent, even when he was ill, and vampire strength made pulling himself up from a single hand hold possible. The Shadowhunters were just as capable but he had never been at full strength as a Shadowhunter. He'd only ever been a promising child and an ailing young man. Having a chance to really put the vampire strength and speed to the test was exhilarating even in the situation.

At the top of the vent, he turned to reach a hand down and help pull Julia Graymark the rest of the way out of the opening. She was one of the girls who wore Tessa's clothing though she was much shorter than Tessa was and the dress had to be tied to allow her to walk. Jem returned her smile but he knew that the lace at the collar of the blue dress she wore was rough because he'd once pushed it out of the way while Tessa curled against his chest and tilted her head back. That was not a thought he could entertain and be useful. He turned back to the gap in the gray stone and he and Julia helped pull up the next climber.

Once everyone was standing on solid ground, Charlotte took the stele and headed for the door. The room they'd climbed into was a crowded workshop. It was disused. Bits of machinery, cogs and gears and strips of thin metal bands inscribed with swimming runes were piled haphazardly.

It didn't seem possible that someone like Mortmain would keep a space in disarray. He had been tightly controlled every time Jem had ever seen him. There was a suppressed energy to him but no sense of chaos. This room spoke to a mind in chaos.

Julia had stepped away from him and was looking closely at a collection of metal body parts. She picked up a head and had to heft it to hold it up for everyone to see. It was nearly featureless, a mechanical skull with empty eye sockets.

"Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well," Richard said to which Julia blinked in confusion. Jem didn't care much for Hamlet but he'd spent too much time too close to Will to not know a Shakespeare quote when he heard one. There were almost enough sword fights in Hamlet to balance out the soliloquies. Will had gone through a phase when he was about 14 where he had climbed furniture and recited the soliloquies in absurd voices.

The jaw of the skull hung a little unevenly on a hinge and it started to swing silently as though it were trying to bite something invisible. Julia jumped and threw it. It clamoured against the pile she had lifted it from and continued to twitch silently. It was no longer attached to whichever part in the neck that allowed for speech but it was trying. Gasping or screaming or chewing.

The impact set off a chain reaction. The other things in the pile started to move as well. Metal screeched against metal as a disembodied foot twitched against a joint that might have been an elbow. Jem grabbed Julia's sleeve and pulled her away as the cascade began. Pieces fell to the floor to join others that already littered the floor.

"What did you do?" Charlotte asked as she scrawled the open rune on the door and pushed it open. Something small and bronze half bounced, half hopped towards them and Jem kicked it back into the mess before he turned and ran for the door.

"They're still alive," Kal said once the door had been tightly shut on the rattling, shifting mass of metal bits.

"You can't kill a demon in this realm. The bodies are destroyed but the spirit that animated them remains," Charlotte said. It was a truth that Shadowhunter children all knew. Demons returned to their dimension when they died. Unless they had been sealed into a body that could not die. The spirits were still attached to the pieces.

"That sounds horrific," Jem said.

"They’re demons," Kal said in the least kind voice that Jem had ever heard from her.

In the silence after the door had been shut, they found themselves not in a hallway but in a larger room. The floor was pitted and scarred. Gouges had been torn from the walls. There was a single automaton, ripped into pieces and strewn across the floor. Bits of it still twitched.

"The demons have been entertaining themselves," Jem said grimacing as a jointed silver finger wiggled.

"Can you imagine what they'd do to us?" Julia said. Jem hadn't been imagining that but now he was. The demons were trapped in bodies they didn't have full control over. They were smart and angry and violent. They'd found other outlets for their rage. Caught with no specific injunction against causing damage and they would do horrible things. The scar on Tessa's shoulder came to mind and she'd been protected by an instruction that she not be killed.

In the hallway, Charlotte and a woman named Maybelle left to inscribe an open rune on every door between the room they stood in and the next corner. By having every door open before they stepped into the hall, there would be many places to scatter to if they needed to hide. Charlotte had organized them into little teams to search the rooms and Jem fell into step beside Kal as they waited for the signal to start.

"Where do you think she is?" Kal asked softly.

"London, I assume," Jem answered. Kal worried about Tessa almost as much as he did.

The signal came. 3 sharp knocks on a hollow surface down the hall and they started out. The first two rooms were similar to the one they had been in. Each team disappeared into their room and then came back to the start to share notes before they moved on.

They didn't just leave the doors unlocked. They took the time to smash out the locking mechanisms themselves so the doors couldn't be relocked even if they fell shut. If they ever needed to run, to scatter, there would be many places for them to retreat to.

At the next corner, the pattern was repeated, runes on every door and then the signal to start searching. They were searching both for anything interesting and new fissures that might lead to new areas or the next air vent to climb. Once the signal came Kal and Jem pushed into the first room. They cracked the door and waited for an alarm before pushing it all the way open.

This room was a sitting area not unlike Tessa's. A set of armchairs sat by a burning fire. It was cozy and plain, decorated in rich colours with landscapes hung on the stone walls to make it look less like a cave. On the rug by the fire was a woman and a small child. The little had blonde curls and wasn't old enough to be wearing more than a nursery dress. The woman had sallow skin, brown hair and green eyes that didn't sit quite right in her face. She stood very straight and didn't smell right. She didn't have a heart beat. It took Jem a moment to place the lack of sound. Not human.

Jem froze and started to wave Kal back into the hallway. In one of the rooms of machine parts they'd found enough pieces to furnish makeshift weaponry and he adjusted his grip on a heavy sharpened piece of metal that he hadn't had to use yet.

It was the child who broke the silence, opening a tiny mouth to yell out, "Mama!"

The inhuman creature didn't respond to the call. It also hadn't responded to Jem's presence. It simply stood in place, looking like a girl and smelling like a machine. The woman who must have been the child's mother emerged from the other room and Jem's shock at finding a child in a place like this switched to her.

"Jessamine?" he said, forgetting the automaton in human skin and the child and Kal stepping around him to see what he was looking at.

"Jem?" she said. The child toddled over to Jessie and she picked him up absently. "What are you doing here?"

"Attempting to escape," Jem said glancing at the automaton.

"Oh that, that's just my Miranda, nothing to worry about. She isn't one of the nasty ones," Jessamine said nodding at the woman thing. Jessie looked much as Jessie ever had though her clothing wasn't quite as lavish as Jem remembered it being. Her hair was carefully styled, her skin was pale, she was calm.

"You took Mortmain's deal," Kal said. Jem had forgotten that she was in the room with them.

"Don't sound so disapproving, did you enjoy living in a cage?" Jessamine asked with a little smile as though they were discussing the weather.

"And you'd rather carry his children?" Kal asked.

"Jeremiah is my son," Jessamine said and the veneer shattered for a moment. It was almost a snarl. The flash of protective anger vanished as quickly as it had come. Jessamine's voice was sweet when she said, "I named him after my father. He'll grow to be a great man someday and he will never have to be a Shadowhunter. Will you darling? No, not my baby."

"Mortmain will train him up to destroy Shadowhunters instead," Kal said and Jem put a hand on her arm and shook his head. Jessamine looked up from her cooing at the baby but didn't respond to the comment.

"Jessie, we're leaving," Jem said.

"Didn't you die?" Jessamine said. "There was an awful lot of blood. I remember it. An awful lot. Didn't you die?"

"Yes," Jem said.

"So what are you?" Jessie's voice held disdain.

"A vampire," he told her and as it had with Charlotte, saying it out loud made him uncomfortable.

"Oh, well," Jessie said.

"We're leaving," Jem repeated.

Jem heard the footsteps in the hall and Kal wheeled around, weapon in hand, before Charlotte appeared in the doorway. She caught sight of Jessie and let out a little shriek. Her mouth was partly open, she'd been about to say something else.

"Hello Charlotte," Jessamine said. "Look Jerry, this is Charlotte!"

Charlotte looked at Jem and then back at Jessie and the baby and then at the automaton. Her bafflement and a sort of protective joy warred with the no nonsense expression her face fell into when she was giving orders. Jem often forgot that Charlotte was small but when she looked so confused like that she suddenly seemed tiny and almost childlike.

"Is this your baby Jessamine?" Charlotte asked. Charlotte didn’t lose the shock while Jessie introduced the child to Charlotte and even let her hold him. The child was adorable and looked like a tinier copy of Jessamine. He didn’t look like any father as far as Jem could tell.

Jessamine had always wanted a very specific sort of happily ever after. She had always wanted the nice house and fashionable clothing and the perfect family with beautiful babies. She had wanted a nice mundane husband. Now she had this. The beautiful child but nothing else.

“Jessie,” Jem tried one more time, “Jessie we’re leaving. Do you want to come with us?” She hadn’t once acknowledged the fortress or the strangeness of finding them there beyond her comment that he should be dead. She had none of Charlotte’s shock and Jem worried there was something wrong with her.

“I can’t leave Jeremiah,” she said.

Jem blinked in surprise, “Of course not, he’ll come with you.” The baby had grabbed hold of Charlotte’s hair and he laughed when she untangled the strand from his tiny fingers. The sound was so incongruous with the stone walls and locked doors that Jem felt a little ill. Laughing children, just up the hall from a room where automatons had torn one another to scrap.

Jessamine sent Miranda, an automaton Nanny who did exactly as it was told and nothing more, to the bedroom to make the bed before they left. Out in the hallway there were ten more Shadowhunter women waiting and twelve children, most too young to even be walking on their own. One of the women was pregnant. No one had opted to stay behind in their little suites with their nannies and their locked doors.

They’d been moving fast. Kal’s limp was biggest drain on their speed and even that didn’t stop them from clearing hallways quickly and efficiently. Now they were going to have to climb air vents with babes in arms and keep children quiet as they ran past the inevitable guards. They were also going to run out of food faster than they’d expected.

Jem worried.

But stronger than the worry was the sense of accomplishment in having done something right. Opening those doors made the world just a little better than it had been a moment before.

Charlotte was giving orders, Richard was giving explanations of where they’d come from and where they were going. Kal stood to Jem’s right and looked over the little reunion. A pair of sisters had been separated when one had chosen to leave the jail for motherhood and they held hands and passed a bundle back and forth between them. Jessamine stood on his other side talking softly to the child in her arms about going to London.

They would split up into two teams. The faster group, the one Charlotte assigned Jem to, would continue to move ahead and find safe routes. The others would follow along, searching more thoroughly.

They’d made it this far.

They just needed to make it a little farther.


	20. Cadair Idris

* * *

Gideon Lightwood

November 7, 1882

* * *

 

Gideon left the Institute before dawn had started lighting the streets. His father had also risen early or perhaps he had never slept. Gideon slipped by the office where he father sat and muttered inaudibly to himself with a worried glance at the shaft of light that spilled through the partly open doorway. There was something very wrong with Benedict but he didn't have time to dwell on it. His brother's room had been silent and for that he was grateful. Someone should be getting some sleep.

Gideon was heavily armed with blades either heavy enough or sharp enough to dismantle an automaton. His black gear and the collection of runes he'd inscribed on his skin rendered him nearly invisible as he ran past the waking mundane city beneath a rapidly lightening sky. He thought for a moment that he had made the meet up point before the others but Sophie appeared out of the shadows when he came to stop in the square.

She wore black as well and carried swords. She was silent as she motioned him forward into the empty, desolate building with old sacks of tea still stacked against one wall. It had been a warehouse once. It had likely gone under while the British economy had been foundering in the wake of the arrival of the automatons. Many companies had rebounded but not all of them. At the far end was a painfully small group of Shadowhunters standing before a design on the wall.

"There aren't many of us left," Gideon said.

"The Clave is sending all their people as well. We'll be more before we get there," Sophie told him.

"How many?" he asked.

"Not as many as we'd like," she said.

They reached the group. Gideon picked out William Herondale leaning against a wall with his arms tightly crossed and his face an empty mask. He nodded when he saw Gideon but didn't come to greet him or say a word. This day was hinged on the information of his informant. It was her, the girl from the exploding automaton factory who had finally explained what Benedict Lightwood had meant when he'd said, "Idris."

They were headed to Wales. There was an old legend that the mountain of Cadair Idris was hollow. A great underground fortress that had once been used by the Wild Hunt. They finally had a location and for the first time in four years, the Shadowhunters would be making an attack instead of worrying at the edges of Mortmain's great destructive enterprise. A pessimistic voice in Gideon's head wondered how many of them would still be alive at the end of the day.

It had taken 3 days of planning to get to this point and Gideon had had front row seats to watching Will winch his anxiety and worries more and more tightly under control. Even the most oblivious of the Shadowhunters had started avoiding him before the end of the first day.

There had been plenty of anxiety in those rooms while the planning had happened. Infiltration schemes. Plans. Maps of Wales and the terrain around the mountain had been passed around and around. Rupert Blackthorn, his arm still recovering from the injury he'd sustained during the last attack had taken to poking holes in any idea. In the end it made their plans stronger but he'd been nasty about it and brought the mood of every discussion down. Will had started sniping back.

Tessa had claimed that she could kill Mortmain. In a hastily written note she had claimed, "I am the only one who can get close enough." But when Mortmain died, so did the automatons and that hadn't happened yet. They weren't waiting for her.

"Magnus! You missed this bit!" Henry Branwell, bright hair flying off in all directions stood at the base of a ladder waving a diagram. Magnus Bane was at the top of the ladder writing runes on the wall. He drew his eyebrows together over his cat's eyes and frowned at Henry's flapping paper before leaning down to snatch it out of his hands.

The two of them had been the oddest pair over the last three days. Bouncing ideas back and forth faster than anyone else could follow. Gideon wasn't sure how much they should be trusting a warlock who more rings than he had fingers but Will and the others had soundly voted him down. Even Rupert accepted Magnus's help without objection. Magnus had been a part of the rescue that had brought the Shadowhunter orphans to the Children's House and though Gideon didn't know those details it had won Magnus the resistance's trust.

Magnus finished scrawling the last runes and the entire display lit up. A tangle of runes, some from the Gray Book, some alien, created an arch about seven feet tall. It glowed acid green. Magnus hopped off the ladder and kicked it out of the way. It fell in a clattered to the floor less than six inches from Will who raised his eyebrows but didn't move. The warlock ran a hand over the space inside the arch of runes and it wavered as though it were covered in a thick black curtain.

"Are we ready?" Magnus asked with a grin.

"How does it work?" Will asked coming to stand beside him.

"It's a portal," Henry said.

"Yes, you said so before," Will said. "How does it work?"

Henry launched into an explanation of how the perception and clarity runes from the Gray Book interacted with the runes Magnus had drawn to allow anyone standing in front of it to decide where it would open. That much Gideon understood, what came next was unintelligible.

"So you think hard and then step through?" Will said in the middle of a sentence that included the phrase "conceptual runic magics" and Henry paused and nodded.

Will would be going through first as he was the only one among them who had ever seen Cadair Idris. Most of their little force would go with him to start scouting the land and trying to find entrance points. Margaret Townsend, Sophie and a few others would be waiting for the Clave's delegation and would follow through the activated portal.

"I'll stay if you'd like me to. That is if you think it would be useful to have someone else here," Gideon said to Sophie when he caught the glare she wasn't able to suppress when Margaret was giving instructions. Sophie started to shake her head but Margaret asked her come over to help sort the maps they had for the mountain. When Sophie didn't move as quickly as she would have liked, she snapped her fingers.

"Stay," Sophie whispered to Gideon before picking up the box that Margaret had indicated and taking it over to a nearby ledge to begin pulling out what they wanted.

An hour later, Will and Rupert and the others were long gone. Gideon and Sophie sat outside the warehouse on a pair of crates they'd dragged out into the morning sunshine. Sophie was tight lipped and quiet. Her hair was pulled back tightly, the scar on her face was livid and did nothing to detract from her appearance. She was beautiful and she wasn't paying him any attention while he pretended he wasn't looking at her.

Sophie saw them first and stood to cross the space calling out the code that they were to answer, "Saffron lights the victory march," but she moved confidently, already sure that they were who they said before someone called back, "Green will mend our broken hearts." Lines from an old Shadowhunter poem. Gideon glanced back into the warehouse and waved Margaret over.

"Gideon?" a voice asked and he swung around to see his brother.

"Gabriel?" Gideon turned to see his brother walking with Sophie back towards him.

“I suppose this is meant to explain all your secretiveness and skulking off at all hours,” Gabriel said when he reached them.

“And how you always seem to know Father’s business before anyone else does,” Gideon said and he was smiling. His brother was here and for the first time since they were children they could do something worthwhile together.

 

* * *

William Herondale

November 7, 1882

* * *

 

The mountain was peaceful and serene. It was exactly as he had remembered it. As a child they had climbed to the clearing where he opened the portal and Cecily had climbed the oak tree nearby and thrown acorns at his head. The tree was the same. Even before the sucking feeling of the portal had worn off he was fighting the urge to climb the tree to see if the spot where he had cut a WH with a pocket knife was still there. Ella hadn't believed that he could get that high so he needed to prove it.

He didn't climb the tree. He didn't mention his connection to this place. There were plans and the effort sticking to them was taking all his self discipline. He knew where Jem was, he just had to get in there and find him. Tessa was hurt and she was down in the ground somewhere below them and that knowledge tore at him.

“Dying helped no one,” hadn't Sophie said that to him once in the darkest days after he'd thought he'd lost Jem forever, "being dead won't bring him back," and being dead definitely wouldn't help get anyone out of the cave. So he stuck to the plan and the scouting routes and the procedures they had put in place. He even tried not to glare while he did it.

When they found the first fissure, they marked it as they were supposed to and moved on. Will clenched his teeth and accepted it. They found four more before they returned to the clearing to compare notes. His mood had been miserable and his temper on a hair trigger since the morning he'd woken alone with a note tucked into his hand instead of the girl who had fallen asleep on his chest.

Mortmain had started his retaliation for the failure to kill him on the bridge before dawn that day. Automatons flooded the London streets to the horror and delight of the mundanes and Mortmain had killed three more Shadowhunter girls, leaving them in front of the Institute gates to stain the stones with blood.

Will prayed to anything that might be listening that Tessa never found out. She'd gone back to her own hell, gone back to silence and all manner of experiences that left scars, to save the lives of those strangers. It hadn't worked. Will choked on the knowledge. He was sure it would be worse for her. It would knock Tessa back into those silent staring moments that she had been so prone to when he'd first met her.

Will flopped down onto the ground. Lying on his back was uncomfortable with the swords he wore but he didn't really care. He needed to settle. The Clave Shadowhunters had arrived and Will did not want to sit and talk about maps with people who had spent the last three years sitting happily in Alicante, sipping wine and discussing the horrible situation in England. He could barely stomach the idea of sitting and talking about maps with people who had seen what he had seen.

"Will," Sophie's voice was above him and in his patch of sun. It was rare to get sun like this in November. She kicked his boot.

"Wouldn't you think an evil mastermind's lair would have a more suiting ambiance?" Will said without opening his eyes, "A little rain, maybe some thunder. Gusts of wind blowing leaves down from the moors."

"I didn't know that Wales had moors," Sophie said. "Sit up and come meet our guests."

"In honour of my homeland," Will said raising a hand in the air with a flourish he proclaimed a curse loudly in Welsh and was shocked when it was answered by a more vulgar one in a woman's voice. Will sat up and looked in the direction of the voice. A pretty girl sat on a branch in the oak tree where his initials were carved. She wore Shadowhunter gear and had a bright white streak of hair that ran through her black hair and down the braid over her shoulder. He looked up at her. Dumbfounded.

She pulled an acorn out of the tree and hit him in the middle of the forehead with it.

"Cecily," he said in a flat voice he almost didn't recognize as his own. Ten years had turned his baby sister into a young woman. And more shocking that that: she was there. She was there and sitting in a tree. Sophie followed his gaze and frowned.

"Hello Gwilym, your name is still up here. I put mine on the next branch up, " his sister said tossing another bit of tree at him. He dodged this one and climbed to his feet.

"I was nine when I put that there, it's hardly fair that you can climb higher than a nine year old," he said coming to stand below her. She was higher up the tree than he had thought. She dropped a few twigs on him and he brushed them off his shoulders and said "Stop that," before pausing to really look at her, "You're alive."

"As are you," she said.

"Come down," he said. "Cariad, come down here and tell me everything."

She swung out of the tree with a Shadowhunter's grace and Will picked her up almost as soon as she hit the ground. She was much taller than she had been and she wore as many blades as he did but he was still taller than her. He lifted her so her feet were off the ground and spun her in a circle as he had done when they'd been children. Cecily had always squealed in delight when he did it but she didn't this time. When he put her down she was smiling just a little at him.

There was something so much darker in her eyes than he could ever have imagined and she looked so much like their mother that the homesickness rolled through him like a wave. It washed away all his other worries and replaced them.

"I heard about the house in York. No one knew it was the Herondales. They said everyone had died," Will said. "They were wrong?"

"I survived," Cecily said in a flat voice that answered all the rest of the questions he wanted to ask. He remembered the curse. He had been free of it for long enough that it didn't usually raise its head to torture him. He had other memories to be tortured by. "All who love you will die."

It had come true hadn't it?

Jem was dead, not gone but dead. His older sister, his parents, even Tatiana, the little girl who had followed him around and wrote poetry about being Mrs. Herondale, they were all dead. Will and Cecily shared a look. Silent grief. She used to cry over squashed snails and then pretend that she wasn't upset. Did she still cry? Will didn't ask. Now was not the time for mourning. Now was barely the time for reunions.

Sophie called them back to the meeting and Will gave her a very hasty introduction. She widened her eyes and hissed, “You never mentioned a sister.” He shrugged it off.

This was the largest gathering of Shadowhunters Will had seen in years and even still it seem a paltry group for what they were planning. Gabriel Lightwood stood with his brother who was explaining how the teams would be distributed and where they would enter the fortress. Gabriel gave Will a look that wasn't nearly as antagonistic as he might have expected. It was more surprised. Will had the mad urge to have a placards made that read, “NOT DEAD” that he could hand out to people. There were other Shadowhunters in the group that Will recognized but none that he would call friends. Then again there weren't many people from before that he would call friends.

They were split into small teams and Will and Cecily maneuvered themselves onto the same squad. He was not going to let her out of his sight. The universe had seen fit to send him his sister and he wasn't going to allow anything to happen to her. That the protectiveness ran both ways wasn't as obvious to Will as it was to anyone else watching. He appreciated having her there even if she brought Gabriel along as well.

"Are you prepared for this?" Will asked he held the map. Margaret may have called in the Clave but each squad was headed up by one of her people. Will was arguably in charge. They had two more resistance Shadowhunters with them as well. A small team to infiltrate and get back out without getting found. They were in charge of rescues. Other people would be worrying about bombs. They had steles and chalks to open doors and mark routes, respectively.

"Always," said Cecily.

"I've been waiting for this chance since they closed the doors on Westminster," Gabriel said.

"Lace your boots then and let's start climbing," Will said.

 

* * *

James Carstairs

November 7, 1882

* * *

 

They had been climbing for 4 days. They'd found workshops and empty rooms. They'd found two separate libraries and a very well decorated parlour. They'd found a room of spoils that would have made Jem vomit if he had had anything in his stomach. Pieces of the lives that had been destroyed when the Institutes had fallen were displayed in cases.

Jem's parents hadn't collected spoils and Charlotte herself had actively removed them from the London Institute so while Jem was familiar with the theory of spoils he'd never seen a Shadowhunter's collection. He wondered they were as macabre or if it was something specific to Mortmain to keep disembodied hands with their voyance runes still staring out from their skin in glass jars of alcohol.

Jem and Charlotte and a few others had doubled back to one of the two kitchens they'd found on the upper levels to steal food but it was all preserves. There was no fresh food which likely meant there was nothing else living in the fortress. They could have gone back down to the prison kitchens far below them but it would have taken far too much time, even now that they knew the route. Pickled vegetables and dried meats and a sack of potatoes they had no way to cook didn't make for good meals but at least no one else was hungry.

Jem wasn't hungry enough to ask. Not yet. Charlotte had suggested it the day before but he had waved her off. Vampires didn't need to eat everyday and as he got older he would be able to go longer and longer between meals. Two days ago he'd finished off the blood supply they'd stolen from the kitchen.

They had found a large circular room that smelled tantalizingly of fresh air though no one could figure out the source of the draft. Half of them were sleeping. Jem sat on the floor with his feet crossed and engaged in his newest hobby. The older children, the ones who were two or three years old, including Jessie's Jeremiah had taken to climbing on him. He could sit still without much effort. It didn't tire his muscles to leave an arm held at a strange angle while a little boy climbed up and hung off it. One little girl with black curls liked to stand beside him and style his hair with her fingers.

The children intimidated him. They were too small and too fragile and sometimes they started crying for no reason and then stopped crying for no reason. He avoided being too close to the adults but the fluttery heartbeats and blood scent of the children didn't make him think of food. In that way at least, they were easier to be around than the others.

After the little stylist had decided he wasn't a threat the other children had started following him around during these rest periods. He'd once woken from a nap to find a weigh in the middle of his back. One of the children had curled up and was using him as a pillow. Their mothers were not helpful. Mostly they just laughed at him and made comments that included words like adorable and darling.

His stylist was making knots in the hair at the top of his head as he repeatedly pulled another little girl off of himself and put her gently back on the ground. She giggled and climbed up his back over and over. He pulled her off each time. Over and over. The game crossed from annoying to amusing and then back to annoying.

He had taken the little girl by the shoulders to tell her to stop when he heard it.

An alarm sounded somewhere in the depths of the fortress.

He looked at the tiny face in front of him who had also frozen at the noise. Jem swore, apologized, sent the child back to her mother and then swore again.

Something had happened.

Four days of good luck but no exits and pursuit was finally coming after them. 


	21. No Such Thing

* * *

Tessa Gray

November 7, 1882

* * *

Warlock changes were the hardest to manage. They started like every other change. She held the object in her hand and reached into it until she found little flicker of ownership. Once the connection was made she could pull the change down like a heavy cloak. Usually that was all it took but with a warlock change, the magic of the body she sought to become got in the way.

When Mortmain had asked her to change into his father, she had held the watch in her hand, made the connection and been taken over. Her body had not been under her own control. It had been terrifying. The first truly bad beating had come after she’d refused to do it a second time. She’d only tried warlock changes a few times before including one attempt to become her tutor Mrs. Black in an attempt to sneak past her guard but Mrs. Black was almost as strong as John Thaddeus Shade had been and she couldn’t take enough control.

This change was different. The change she wanted this time wouldn’t stay. The owner’s mind kept skittering away and taking the change with it. She could hold it for only a few minutes and each moment was a battle of wills. She hoped it would be all she would need.

Mortmain had requested her company. That was the way it was always worded. He requests your company. She’d been dragged off to see a healer and then laced into a corset and dress by maids she didn’t know, who wouldn’t look her in the eye. She wanted to scream at them to look, to see.

“There’s no such thing as Tessa Gray,” was a refrain for Mortmain. He had said those words to her over and over, “There is only what I choose for you to be.”

Each time Jem called her Tess, each time Sophie called her Miss Gray with a little smile, each time Will introduced her by her full name, she believed it a little less. The truth was that there is no such thing as Mrs. Mortmain, nor would there ever be. One way or another today would end that fantasy. She hoped she’d be the one around to see it.

The healing spells always left her feeling disconnected from her body. The sudden cessation of pain should have been a good thing but it always left her feeling like her body wasn’t really her own. It didn’t help that the magic left residue. It would clear in a few hours but until then it was like oil on her skin, clinging and unpleasant.

She hadn't seen Mortmain since she'd been returned. It had been automatons who had found her on the bridge, locked her up and reminded her why what she was about to do was so very necessary. It was automatons who brought her to his drawing room. He looked much as he ever had, not at all like someone who had nearly died. Neat, well pressed, normal. The room was lined with metal bodies. His rooms always were.

He waved her towards him and she didn’t put up any resistance. A fire burned in the grate, pushing back against the November chill. The heavy curtains were open but there was nothing beyond them. No windows in this place.

Tessa couldn't find that empty space in her head. The mental spaces she retreated into were all gone. She'd filled them up with plans and anxieties and people. She reached for her defenses and found Sophie passing her carefully wrapped meals she'd made and Will's laugh and Magnus's voice telling her that whether she did good was up to her and Jem. Always Jem. He'd always been the thing to hold onto in the center of it all.

The last bit of resolve clicked into place. Not to do this but to live through it. She was done hiding.

"Where have you been?" he asked touching her face. It was just a brush of fingers but it pulled revulsion out of the pit of her stomach with enough force she almost gagged on it. She said nothing. She could now. She could scream at him. The magic that had prevented it was gone but that wouldn't bring her any closer to a world without him.

The little attempt at kindness would be followed by something worse. She closed her eyes before he hit her. She used the momentum to back towards the curtained wall as far from the collection of automatons as she could be. He followed her because she was harmless. Hadn't she been harmless for years? She straightened and put her hands up against his chest. He was sneering and talking, always talking. Monologues and speeches and explanations she didn't want to hear. She put her hands on his neck the way a lover might before a kiss. This was the part she was intended to play after all.

She met his eyes and curled her fingers so her nails rested against the sides of his throat. It wasn't threatening. A little odd perhaps but not threatening.

Then she reached for that slippery change and pulled it up as fast and as hard as she could.

"Seize her!" he called, realizing far too late that she wasn't as harmless as he'd believed.

Her fingers lengthened and sharpened. The warlock who owned the hat pin from the market was named Sabine. Sabine's personality fought the change every inch of the way but Tessa has been practicing in the dark for days. Her fingers stretched into the warlock's six inch claws. She was close enough to see Mortmain's eyes widen in alarm. She was close enough to feel the blood warm down her arms.

An automaton finished crossing the room to them. It wrapped an arm around her waist and closed another on her nearest wrist. It pulled her back and the claws tore through cartilage and skin in mess of blood and ragged skin.

Tessa retched and lost the battle to hold the change but it didn't matter any more.

The automaton had lifted her up off her feet and the bones in her wrist ground together painfully under its grip. She kicked out in a movement that was more flail than attack and caught Mortmain in the side of the head. He fell to the ground as he had when Will had kicked him that first night but this time he didn't come up shouting orders.

The automatons along the walls converged grinding out the harsh syllables of demon languages through metal mouths as they reached for the body. If they got him downstairs to the same healers who had repaired her, it would just be another failure.

She did something she’d seen done but never tried. Once, during a lesson, Mrs. Dark had with a harsh incantation flung magic at her disobedient pupil. Tessa couldn’t even remember any more what she had done that made the warlock think she deserved it. It had been like being hit with a wall. She’d had nightmares about that spell. About that word.

She called up all the magic she had, magic she barely knew how to use and screamed out the incantation. She threw all her will into pushing, pushing, pushing. She wasn’t strong enough to do more than shove them back a few feet.

The one holding her dropped her and she staggered and tried to run. Another automaton grabbed her by the forearm and pulled her back, lifting her off the ground again. She struggled against the metal grip in an instant of blind panic. It caught her around the waist while she thrashed. Then it wasn't lifting any more. It wasn't squeezing her tighter or walking her away.

It had frozen.

She pushed against the arm but it held fast. She pulled in a ragged breath around the band of the metal arm squeezing too tight across her ribs. Twisting gave her a little more room to breathe but none to move.

It was dead and she was trapped.

She looked down at the spreading pool of blood as everything that had been Mortmain drained out onto the Persian rug. The automaton that had been trying to lift him to carry him down to help was still bent with it’s arms under his shoulders but it too was frozen in place.

"There is no such thing as Axel Mortmain," she whispered to the silent, dead room, "May the world be better for it."

* * *

Across the British Isles automatons ground to a halt. On London streets, patrols of metal men simply stopped and stared in the center of busy intersections. In Dublin a little boy dared his best friend to throw a rock. It banged off the thing's chest with nothing more than a hollow clank. The theories started flying immediately but none of them came close to the mark.

* * *

Nearly 200 miles away from London, deep underground, the doors of the Cadair Idris fortress started to slam closed to keep the secrets and the evidence hidden away.

 


	22. Beneath Cadair Idris

* * *

William Herondale

November 7, 1882

* * *

Metal rang on metal and the din was punctuated by shrieks as broad swords torn through mechanical body parts. They were in a long hallway and they were being boxed in. Automatons came toward them from both directions. There were two Shadowhunter teams caught in the middle. Ten people and the chances that any of them would walk out of there were dropping by the minute.

The automaton that Will pulled his sword out of pinwheeled but didn’t go down. He grabbed hold of its arm and swung himself up onto its shoulder. It swung a fist at him and hissed. He brought the sword down to remove the arm and then jumped clear, he’d seen what he wanted to see.

He skittered a little coming down on the smooth rock floor but regained his footing and finished his mad dash across the battle. He stopped just shy of where Cecily fought back to back with Gabriel to take the knees out of an automaton moving faster than should have been possible for something its size. The harsh chemical scent of the black oil spilling out made Will grimace.

He had a moment where he could not reconcile the slight figure swinging dual swords with the sister he remembered but there wasn’t time for thoughts like that. There really wasn’t time for thoughts at all.

The legless automaton reached for him and he swung the sword down and it sunk into its head. It didn’t stop scrabbling forward. Will pulled his blade free and more black oil poured from the gash but it didn’t have a brain to damage. He skipped backwards, leading it away from his sister.

“You could do us all a favour and just die when you are killed,” Will said missing the swing that would have taken off its arm. It answered with gurgling mechanical rasping that didn’t sound like words.

Something grabbed hold of Will’s gear from behind and lifted him well off the ground. Will twisted and attempted to bring his sword up to detach the hand but he couldn’t get the strength behind the strike to sever the iron. He swore profusely and swung his weight. If he kept moving, it couldn’t grab him with the other hand and literally tear him into pieces.

The automaton went sideways before it could close its other hand on him. Nearly 7 feet of solid metal knocked into the wall. Will was stunned and for a moment thought that was why he was looking up into a canine face. Grey brown fur, teeth as long as a man’s fingers. Werewolf. Will had just had his life saved by a werewolf.

The wolf lowered big yellow eyes to look at him and then growled and leapt away. The creature that had picked Will up wasn’t disabled. The wolf ripped its arm loose. Will shook off his disorientation and removed the automaton’s head. He stepped back and looked at the wolf again. It was far more incongruous than even discovering his baby sister was well on her way to master swordsmanship.

“Richard!” a voice called and it was a voice Will knew as well as he knew his own. The wolf’s head snapped up in the same direction.

Jem wasn’t facing them. He held a long piece of metal that looked like one of automatons’ weaponry arms. Shiny, bronze and spiked. Jem himself was a tall thin shadow in ragged clothing. His hair was bright but ragged and too long. Otherwise Will could tell nothing about him.

Richard, the big gray brown wolf, barreled past him and used his body weight against another automaton, knocking it off a girl in a green dress. Will had a brief moment of hope that it was Tessa and Jem had found her first but when she looked up she was a stranger, brown hair but no one Will knew. She rolled back to her feet with an ease that spoke of Shadowhunter training.

“You know, we’re supposed to be rescuing you,” Will said following the wake in the battle left by the werewolf. Jem’s head snapped around too fast to be human but his face was exactly as Will remembered it. Shock, a half smile and then a warning.

“Down,” Jem said and Will dropped and rolled to the side without hesitation as Jem brought his weapon up to catch an automaton in the side of the head.

“You’re doing a terrible job,” Jem said pulling Will to his feet as though they’d last seen each other the day before. Will grinned.

In that moment the battle skipped a beat around them. Each automaton stopped briefly and then threw itself back into the fight. A few retreated but those that didn’t fought harder. Will fell into step, finding the old two-man fight positions he’d learned almost from when he had started training.

Jem was fast but rusty. It didn’t matter in a melee like the one that raged around them as the second wave of automatons pushed in. Will readjusted his positions to make sure that he was there to catch any gaps in Jem’s defenses.

Even if they died here, Will didn’t think there was anywhere else he’d rather be. Jem caught a blade across his shoulder and by the time Will had opened his mouth to ask how bad it was the wound was starting to close. The speed of the healing brought him to a stop.

Just for a moment but it was long enough for the next automaton to hit him in the side and knock him to the ground. It hurt but it wasn’t a damaging blow. He sucked in air. He rolled away from the first strike that had been aimed at his head.

The second one came faster but it stopped halfway down.

Will scrabbled farther away and hit a metal leg. He braced for the next strike and prepared to roll again but the strike didn’t come. The automaton that had knocked him down was off balance. It topped over.

Every automaton had stopped.

Everyone tensed waiting for the next swing. Will found his feet and Jem was there at his side. He took the time in the lull to locate Cecily. Still to his left, still with Gabriel, still holding her swords though she was bleeding from a gash on her arm.

Jem nudged his arm with his elbow and raised his eyebrow.

“Never seen this before,” Will answered the silent question. “I missed you, you bastard.”

“I missed you too,” Jem said nudging him again. Jem dropped down out of his fighting stance and walked up to the nearest automaton as though approaching a friend at a party. He looked up at it and poked it in the chest. Then he waved a hand in front of its face. He turned back to Will with a shrug that was so characteristic that Will pulled Jem into a hug. He didn’t smell like Jem anymore but that hardly mattered. They clung together and when they stepped back to look over the room, they stood shoulder to shoulder.

“What happened?” Gabriel asked approaching Will where he stood with Jem. He stopped and cocked his head to the side, “Carstairs?”

“Hello, Gabriel,” Jem said his voice as friendly and even as it had ever been.

“Tessa,” Will said. Gabriel spread his hands in a gesture of confusion that was laced with contempt. Will was too awestruck by the realization of what she had done to let Gabriel get to him. The last time he and Gabriel had been in the same place Will had been 17. He probably would have tried to punch Gabriel for the face he was making. Instead he ignored him and spoke to Jem. And people said he would never grow up.

“Tessa said she could get close enough to kill him. When he dies, the automatons die with him,” Will said.

“Him? Mortmain?” Jem said. “Tessa killed him?”

Will's explanation was lost in a reverberating clash. Everything stopped. The Shadowhunters from the team of women in raggedy dresses to Gabriel's well equipped Clave soldiers all looked up. There was another slam. Will clenched his fists and glanced at Jem but the explanation came from Cecily.

"The doors. We passed two sets," she said.

"Get the wounded up! We need to move fast," Will yelled. The end of it was lost in another slamming door somewhere nearby.

They had lost three fighters, only one of whom Will knew. To leave the bodies felt like the utmost disrespect and so they were being carried like the wounded through the forest of metal bodies. The automatons were frozen whether on the ground or still standing, an obstacle course of dead monsters.

At the next junction the path suddenly cleared. They'd reached the end of the wave. Will would not miss the empty eyes and claustrophobia of walking below the husks. These doors hadn't shut yet but they could still hear the intermittent crashes echoing down the hallways. Each time, Will was sure that they were about to be sealed in.

"You've been marking walls," Jem said stopping at the corner and touching the chalked marks on the wall.

"We were really doing quite a good job of the rescue before the automatons came to kill us," Will said.

"We've still got people here, I'm going back for them," he said.

"I go where you go," Will told him. That he wasn't prepared to leave this place until he found Tessa didn't make the sentiment any less true.

A crash sounded. Closer now than any of the others.

"Cece!" Will called and his sister turned. "I need you to get everyone back to the clearing and then start finding the other teams. Especially the ones further south. They’ll be deeper in the fortress by now.”

If he were being honest, he gave her the job to force her to leave but as he said the words he realized he trusted her to follow through on them. Cecily had always been stubborn and now she channeled all that stubbornness into being an impressive fighter. The Clave Shadowhunters looked to her with respect. She wasn't a little girl.

She argued briefly and angrily in Welsh before agreeing to lead everyone out. Two of the ten who had arrived with Jem stayed as well. Most of them left. Richard, still in wolf form, brought up the rear of the retreat. He looked back once and Jem raised a hand.

Jem led the way down a corridor, moving with the easy confidence of someone who knew exactly where he was going. The slamming doors were closer now. Halfway down the next hallway it finally caught up to them. The door behind them shut with a clang that echoed through the space.

Retreat was on the other side of that door.

"You can go straight to hell," Will said to the door.

"Keep going. We've got to climb," Jem said and Will frowned at him. It wasn't a joke or an understatement. They literally had to climb. The sloping fissure was full of loose rocks and precarious handholds. As they climbed, they filled Will in on the bits and pieces he didn't know, adding details to the little shards of the story he'd gotten from Tessa.

The two girls were from separate Institutes. Julia Graymark from the Conclave at York and Emily Pullman from Cornwall.

"So you're his parabatai?" Julia asked. "Are you still parabatai if he's a vampire? Or is that being parted by death? Naught but death shall part me and thee. He is dead."

"Thank you," Jem said and though Emily looked a little shocked by the entire conversation Julia just shrugged it off.

"We're parabatai," Will said. "Always even if he's a blood sucking fiend."

"Dead and a fiend, wonderful, it is lovely to have friends," Jem said and Will could hear the wry humour in his voice.

The channel opened into a small room. Stone walled and empty. It had two doors and Julia led the way to the one of the right and shouldered it open like a drunk pushing out of a barroom. Beyond was a massive space, domed and circular with many metal doors set off of it. It was grander than some cathedrals. He wondered how close to the surface they were here.

They'd told Will how many they were but the numbers still surprised him. And children. Small children. Including one who bolted across the space on stumbling tiny child legs to attach herself to Jem's trousers. Jem looked bemused and a little uncomfortable with the entire display.

"By the Angel."

Will looked up from Jem's little friend and grinned widely at Charlotte who closed the distance between them with much more grace but no less enthusiasm than the little girl had. Will caught her up in a hug. He caught sight of Jessamine in the little crowd, a tiny blonde child in her arms but she didn't approach them.

"I came to rescue you, Jem thinks I'm doing a terrible job," Will told her. She wiped her eyes and looked between them and blinked back tears again.

"The doors are closing but there are Shadowhunter teams marking the way to exits," Jem said.

"We've got two exits back the way we came but they're behind doors now," Will said. "But we were at the highest entrance points we found. Any way out is below us. All of them are marked. We split into small enough teams to enter at every point above the lake. If we can get to them, we can follow the lines out."

 

* * *

 

It was such an easy plan. It didn't work a simply as all that. They hit four closed doors. It was impossible to tell if the open runes worked on them. The doors themselves slid in from crevices on either side of the hallways. They couldn't be pushed apart. Even if they were unlocked they were simply too heavy to move without equipment and tools the group didn't have.

They were headed back into the fortress. They tried, as much as they could, to stay close to the east side where their best chances of finding Magnus's team were. That group had entered the fortress below Will's team and farther to the east than the second team that had been caught by the automaton attack.

A fifth set of doors stopped them and Will hit the hilt of his sword against it with a satisfying bang. The slamming had stopped. Beyond their own voices and footfalls, there were no other sounds. It was too much like being trapped in a tomb for Will's liking and there was no evidence of Tessa. No evidence of anything.

Seeing Cece and then Jem had knocked his dark temper back a few steps but it was crawling back. He was frustrated and angry. He wanted to see something that wasn't long gray hallways. Jem leaned his back against the door beside Will and crossed his arms. Will didn't turn to see what he was looking at.

"We're stopping for a little while. You should eat something," Jem said.

"So should you," Will said banging again just because he was angry.

"We're down to potatoes and pickled herring," Jem told him. "Nothing that will help me."

Some old ingrained revulsion coiled in his stomach but he said it anyways, "Do you want-"

"No," he said, "I am fine. It will make you weaker and that isn't a good idea."

Jem didn't look at him. He spoke in much the same way he'd always spoken of the yin fen. As little as possible and never directly. Jem had drank from Tessa. Will had been avoiding that thought since he'd learned it. He'd bit her and she still trusted him. He'd have held her close, supported her weight when she'd weakened, put his mouth against her skin. Will banged against the door one more time and then turned and dropped to the ground.

"She escaped," Will said knowing Jem would know who he meant. "She escaped. She got away from the bastard and then went back. She went back of her own free will. Walked back in and she killed him. She's in here somewhere."

"There's no one here," Jem said. "There isn't anyone alive in here but us. When Mortmain's back you can tell. He's not quiet about it. There are more marching feet. More noises. There's been nothing. He's not here, dead or otherwise."

Will banged his head against the door, "She's well. She defeated him. She'll be happy and healthy and doing well when we find her."

"She's stronger than most people," Jem said and the smile on his face was softer, different than anything Will had ever seen on him.

"You're as in love with her as she is with you," Will said and it hurt to say out loud. So many things he hadn't been thinking about were suddenly right there in front of him. The way Tessa talked about Jem. The way he smiled when she was mentioned. That smile spread a little wider but Jem looked down at his hands as though it made him sad. His hair fell forward so Will couldn't quite see his expression.

"She really does, you should hear her talk about you," Will said and he forced himself to grin when he said, "It's disgusting really, such a waste of a voice."

“Still a romantic, I see,” Jem laughed a little, still looking at the floor. There was a bang on the door and Will looked at Jem first thinking he had picked up Will's little temper tantrum and was hammering on the walls. But he wasn't. He looked back with his head cocked to the side. Will turned and banged again. It was answered.

Will got to his feet and knocked again. An answer. He hollered a greeting. The rest of the group down the hall was paying attention now. There was a faint sound on the other side. Voices but too indistinct to make out.

"I think it's the team we're looking for," Jem said. "Get away from the door. They're telling us to move back."

"Your bat ears have their uses my fiend friend," Will said.

"How long will I have to endure vampire fiend jokes?" Jem asked as they moved towards the others.

"Until you stop being a vampire."

"Forever then?"

"Yes."

"Delightful," Jem was all sarcasm but he was smiling at Will in that way he used to, like they were the only two in on the joke.

The air was heavy with anticipation. The door sat there. Ominous and solid. Dark metal with heavy rivets holding it together. It caved in towards them with an earth shaking noise that made the children scream. Bulging first before the doors split, the metal on either side of the point where the two halves had met bent out. It wasn't a large hole but it was big enough. Smoke curled.

"We found Henry," Will said. "Never goes anywhere without explosives, that one."

"Henry, my Henry?" Charlotte's voice was small. Had Will mentioned that Henry was on the mountain? He couldn't remember. He nodded at her now.

It was Magnus that stepped through the hole, "It appears that now we're all trapped together. That's an improvement." He wore black but not Shadowhunter gear. He managed to look elegant climbing out of the smoking remains of the shattered door.

"Why don't you just draw a portal and let yourself out?" Will asked.

"Because we were trying to find you," Magnus told him and looked past him, "Is that a baby?"

“More than one. Is Henry with you?” Will asked. Will wasn’t always sure that Magnus more than tolerated him but these little conversations that bounced back and forth always made him feel like they were truly friends.

Henry climbed through the hole in the middle of a conversation. He was always in the middle of a conversation. He used to be better at managing himself but these days he was either silent or talking a mile a minute.

"I really don't think we should have used the explosive. There are a lot of fissures in this part of the cave," whatever else he had to say on the topic died on his lips. He was dusty from crawling about inside the fortress but they all were. His hair stuck up at an odd angle because it always did. It had been sticking up like that when Will had first met him. He hadn't looked like this when Will had first met him. Shock and then a happiness that dissolved into tears when Charlotte crossed the gap and threw herself at him.

Everyone else suddenly found something else to be interested in. There were a very large number people in a small space but the lack of privacy didn't bother Charlotte and Henry who were completely wrapped up in one another. Will smiled and Jem leaned an elbow against his shoulder and said, "You're a little bit of a romantic."

"Absolutely not," Will muttered back but the smile didn't go anywhere.

The doors disappeared into crevices where they would be retracted when the doors were shut. The crevice on the right had been widened by the explosive force. A member of Henry's team leaned back against the door and it shifted farther with a grinding noise. Rock against rock. The shadowhunter jumped up and backed away but the damage had been done. The grinding didn't stop. The door was tipping as whatever casing had held it in place inside the wall fell to pieces.

"Be ready to run," Will heard someone say but his attention was on the spreading web of cracks.

"I hate it when you're correct, Henry," Will said. Henry still had his arms around Charlotte and they were watching the wall as well. Around them, the children were being gathered and the crowd was moving back toward the next corner. Voices called orders, babies cried and the rock kept splintering.

The first chunk of ceiling fell and Jem hauled Will away from it. A shaft of sunlight fell in after it. They'd accidentally blown themselves an escape route. A second piece came down and the hall got brighter. The eerie greenish glow of the spelled lamps was replaced by bright afternoon sun.

Will laughed at the stroke of luck.

Jem suppressed a hissing noise and swore.


	23. Sunshine

 

* * *

James Carstairs

November 7, 1882

* * *

 

Jem tucked his shoulders in tighter and leaned back into the little space. His skin had blistered and split and he could feel it reattaching itself. He felt someone touch his face and convulsed away from it. The instinct to lash out was so strong he had to fight hard to pull back and keep from accidentally hurting someone. The fight or flight instinct was coming down hard on the fight side. He forced his eyes open. 

"Will," he said. His voice was small but normal. It surprised him. None of the compulsive hostility nor the pain was in it.  

"It's over," Will said. "Stay still, you're still healing."

Will had tossed him his jacket when the ceiling had started to fall and it hung too loose but the leather of the gear kept out the worst of the sunlight. They had been very close to the same size once but either he had gotten thinner or Will had gotten broader. 

He fisted his fingers into the fabric and held it close just to keep his hands occupied. The unpleasant violent reaction hadn't completely faded. There was no enemy to attack but he couldn't convince his knotted muscles to relax. He hadn't been this upset during the battle. 

The cracking had faded to rains of pebbles and the odd thud. It was over. The space was brighter than Jem could remember the world ever being. Even at a distance, the sunlight hurt. It wasn't blistering pain. It was less than that. Nettles and paper cuts. It nevertheless tore at that need to protect himself by any means necessary. 

Will's attention was somewhere else and Jem could hear the conversations happening on the other side of fall of stone that separated him from the light.

"Go," he said to Will who looked at him with concern but disappeared from the opening to his little space and let more light in. Not an actual sunbeam. Indirect. Paper cuts. 

Run. Fight. Stop. Stop.

He squeezed his eyes shut, held onto the jacket and fought against the vampire instincts for a good memory to keep him stable.

His father holding the violin so he could play with the bow before he was big enough to hold it himself. 

Will bringing him that jade pendant because he knew that jade was from China. 

Charlotte correcting his essays before he handed them into the tutor with a little conspiratorial smile. 

Tessa. Tessa laughing as he adjusted her grip on a parasol and tried to teach her the basics of sword fighting without swords. Tessa looking up at him and cuddling in closer. Sometimes he could call up such vivid recollections of her that she was almost there with him. If he closed his eyes he could imagine that she was there with him and that is what he reached for now. That imaginary nearness was what he sought now.

He wanted to know where she was. He wanted her there. He wanted to be close to the sound of her heartbeat and that warm spicy magic scent of her and the way she looked at him like she saw all the way through him. 

"What happened?" Jem asked when Will reappeared, blocking just enough light to bring relief. 

"Magnus threw a shield up over everyone and then fainted," Will said sitting down at the edge of the little cave. 

"I. Did. Not. Faint," Magnus said from somewhere beyond what Jem could see. 

"Of course you didn't," Will called to him before turning back to Jem, "Just a couple bruises, no one is hurt. They're leaving without us," his voice was very mild when he added, "the bastards." 

"You could go," Jem said and Will didn't even bother answering him. 

There was a lot of sunlight. Much of the ceiling had collapsed and getting out was just a matter of climbing up and out onto the grass. Even with the children, they were good at climbing. Will was bouncing around the cave with far too much energy, helping and talking and flirting just enough that Jem saw Charlotte cast him a disapproving look. The sounds of them all were happy and busy. He'd never felt more separate. 

Will and Charlotte kept him company when they weren't needed somewhere else. Kal stopped by, carrying someone else's baby, and he told her what had happened and how Tessa was involved in it. He'd mastered the panic though the indirect annoying pain hadn't gone anywhere. 

Instead, he was fighting hunger. 

The cave smelled of dust and people but it was easier to block out the sound of heartbeats when there so many. It was background noise, nothing to be worried about. But proximity made it worse. Charlotte had leaned in to check him for injuries and he'd had to hold his breath and not move. 

Before, the fact that no one else smelled like Tessa was enough to keep the hunger down but now he was too hungry for it to make much of a difference. He hadn't realized how tightly the hunger was tied to her. He had never drank from anyone else. Bottled animal blood which he never really wanted and Tessa who he always did. 

Will sat down, blessedly, in his light as the sounds from beyond the wall vanished completely. Will was talking about portals and where they would find it and how to use it and how they'd be back in London once the sun set but it washed over him. Comforting noise, not information he should be paying attention to. 

"I'm sorry?" he had to say when Will paused waiting for an answer. 

"How hungry are you?" he asked.

Jem sighed and tried to find an answer that wasn't the truth. He tried to make the truth different. Will didn't need him to explain it. Even after so much time apart, there were things that didn't need said. 

"If I offered it, would you take it?" Will asked. 

"How much would you hate it?" Jem asked. 

"Anyone else, I wouldn't offer," Will said and then with a little smirk and a sideways glance so he wasn't looking directly at Jem when he said it, "Tessa claims it doesn't hurt at all." 

Jem didn't ask how much Tessa had talked about him. That she had mentioned him at all seemed an impossibility. To be given back the ability to speak and to use it to talk about the vampire who’d almost killed you seemed ridiculous. Will's words about her loving him kept circling back through other thoughts whether he wanted them there or not. She shouldn't love him but he wanted her to. He wanted to know that she didn't feel quite complete without him either. 

Jem untangled himself from the too big jacket and the too small space of the back of the crevice and sat closer to Will. It was shadowed but the sunlight was bright enough to cast everything in sharp detail. Will's expression was carefully unworried. A mask. 

Jem wanted to tell him that it wasn't necessary, that they'd go find a sheep or deer on the hillside but Will rolled up a sleeve and held out his arm. An offer of human blood pulled at his blasted vampire instincts harder than he would have liked. 

Jem held Will’s gaze for a minute and then took his arm. He glanced up at Will one more time and Will gave him a nonchalant shrug. No one who had known him before the change had ever seen him feed. This was the end of the fantasy that there was a return to normal possible. Will relaxed his muscles. Jem could feel it where he held his forearm. 

Before the next wave of doubts could pull him under, he bit down just higher than the pulse point at Will's wrist. He tasted different. Once, years ago, a vampire had told them that he liked to eat Shadowhunters because they tasted like candy. Jem tried to push that thought out but it wouldn't go. 

If Tessa tasted like spice and magic, Will tasted like sugar and strength. 

Finding the desire to stop was difficult. This is what his blood had tasted like once. His body seemed to remember it, to want it. The hunger was a force. When he did find the ability to pull away, their eyes met. Jem still held his arm, a smear of blood there against runed skin but no open wound. Will looked as drunk as he felt. 

"Not what I had expected, James," Will said with the tiniest smile. “Do you remember that vampire in Limehouse?” Jem nodded, “Was he right?” Will asked, leaning his head back against uneven stone, “Do I taste like candies?” 

“A little,” Jem said and Will laughed. Jem laced his fingers through Will’s and let their hands connect them across the space of the cave. Even the sunlight didn’t bother him so much now. He leaned his head back against the stone and dozed in a wave of exhaustion and the mixed contentment of the blood running though him and Will sitting beside him. 

 

They talked about nothing and everything while they spent the remainder of the afternoon boxed in by sunlight. Jem felt enormously better for having eaten and enormously uneasy for having done it too. Will told him about the war and the Clave’s retreat. Jem told him what he knew about Mortmain’s operation from the other side. They talked around his vampirism even though the sunlight narrowed his eyes to slits and he could still see the blood smear on Will’s arm. 

Will told him what had happened to Tessa since he’d last seen her. It hadn’t been long. In the little universe of the cave and the cages, it had barely been a blink of the eye. Out in the world a lot had happened. He had always worried about her but he’d never imagined her inside exploding buildings or returning to Mortmain if she had another option. She was stronger even than he thought she was.

When it was finally dark enough that Jem could step out of the crevice and into the fading light, they climbed up to the grass. Jem straightened and looked at a world that stretched to a distant horizon and not a wall. Cadair Idris sloped down to a field dotted with trees. They were on the slope facing away from the lake and it could have been country side anywhere as far as Jem could tell. The sun hadn’t entirely set yet but he resisted that urge to flinch away from the orange glow on the horizon.  

"I'd forgotten," Jem said. 

"Forgotten how exceptionally handsome I am?" Will asked. 

"Yes, that, obviously," Jem said shoving him "I'd forgotten I'd never be able to go out in the sun again." 

"It's overrated," Will said with a look of undisguised concern. 

"You're different," Jem said. "Kinder, I think, kinder to other people. You were almost gentle and reassuring earlier when you were talking to the others of how everyone would get back to London." 

Will's entire body language changed. He tucked in on himself just a bit, defensive perhaps or childlike. He looked over at Jem with very serious eyes in the fading light. "I've never told anyone."

"Why you're kind?" Jem asked in the long silence. 

"Why I wasn't," Will said looked at him as though he expected a rebuke. 

"I'll keep your secrets if you need me to," Jem said. “Or you can keep them, you owe me nothing.”

"I owe you everything,” Will said. His chin was up and he was looking up at the sky and the deepening shadows of the world around them. He was thinking very hard. 

“When I was 12 years old, I released a demon from a pyxis and it killed my sister," Will's voice was flat and clinical but not quite emotionless. There was something underneath that flatness, roiling emotion held in place. "My father had kept it in his desk. I opened it thinking it was just a box. The demon cursed me. It told me that all who loved me would die if I did not remove myself from them. And that night, Ella died. Just as it had promised. I left that morning. I took a horse and I left. I went to London and joined the Shadowhunters.”

Jem didn’t interrupt him. 

"I was awful. I was awful to everyone because if I was awful enough, they couldn't love me. If they couldn't love me then I wouldn't hurt them," Will said and he looked at Jem again and this time the look was darker: an expectation that he would be rejected or hated. Jem had never seen Will so unguarded and it took him a moment to follow the reasoning. Will had been awful. To everyone. Everyone except him.  

"But I was dying," Jem said. 

"I thought maybe I couldn't hurt you," Will said. "I couldn't make it worse."

"I wouldn't’ve left you, even if you'd told me," Jem said. 

"I know," Will said, "I was so selfish. I was selfish enough to risk your life so that I could have a friend. I could talk around it but it was selfishness. I tried to leave. After the attack on the Institute, after you died and Charlotte died and it was all torn to bits, I tried to leave. 

“Sophie found me. She hired Magnus of all people to hunt me down with a tracking spell and she told me off. Told me I was selfish and insensitive, which was true, and that there were other people who needed me. 

"After, I told Magnus of the curse. He helped me hunt down the demon, figure out which kind and which one. And we found it, raised it, forced it to answer us,” he stopped for a moment before continuing, “And it hadn't cursed me at all. It had murdered my sister and torn apart my family and ruined my life but it hadn't actually cursed me. Just told a little boy a lie. It had all been a great bloody waste," Will said. The emotion pushed through to the surface at the end there and Jem reached out a hand to take Will's. 

"I have always loved you, you were my friend and my brother at your worst," Jem said. "And you've made so much of it since Will. The world went to hell and you lost it all again and yet here you are, stronger and better even than you were when it started and you were good back then. You were always good."

Will looked at him with the emotion laid bare for just another moment before squeezing his hand and reassembling the mask. Now that he knew what lay below it, watching all Will’s confidence and good cheer slide back into place was almost unsettling. Will smiled at him with all traces of it gone. Jem blinked slowly, unsure how to handle the emotional swing. 

“Let’s get out of this godforsaken country and go home,” Will said. 

“Isn’t this your homeland?” Jem asked following him as he started to pick his way over brambles, headed up hill. 

“Shush,” he said. “If they hear you, they’ll come parading up the hill with their sheep and their singing and their ridiculous language and drag me back down to be reeducated as a proper Welshman.” 

He led the way up the hill as though he’d been born on a mountain side and for all Jem knew about his early childhood, he might have been. At a clearing halfway up they found a smooth rock face rising out of the grass it was inscribed with green glowing runes. Two bored Shadowhunters lounged in the grass near it, cleaning their weapons by witchlight. 

“You’re supposed to call the code phrase,” one said pointing his dagger at Will. It was obvious they knew each other though Jem knew neither of the men. They cast him a curious glance but said nothing. News must have been traveling ahead of him. 

“Pink for the colour of your mother’s underthings?” Will said. 

“Purple for the colour of the bruise I’ll give you,” the man in the grass said through a laugh. 

“That doesn’t rhyme at all,” Will said. “Rings, sings, flings, you had so many options. I’m disappointed.”

“Get off the mountain, Will, leave us all in peace. We’ve still got teams searching the hill,” the other man said waving a hand at them. 

“See, he can rhyme: still, Will, hill. Well done, Anton,” Will said then he led Jem up to the edge of the wall and then stepped into the dark between the runes. Jem paused and Anton told him to go before it lost the location. He closed his eyes and stepped through the sucking blackness and swirling magic onto a dark London street for the first time in years. 


	24. Connections

* * *

James Carstairs

November 8, 1882

* * *

 

"Have they found anything?" Jem asked as soon as Will came back into the laboratory. He had been trapped inside since dawn. He had tried to sleep but it hadn't been very successful. Henry's laboratory was the only room in the Children's House that didn't have any windows. Others had been in and out during the day. He'd been woken up from a brief nap by Henry who had been surprised to be reminded that he was in the room. 

Henry and Charlotte were never far apart and it was heartwarming and also woke up this deep wanting that lived in an empty space somewhere in his ribcage. He wanted to be able to turn around every couple of minutes like that just to check that Tessa was still there. He wanted her close and safe. Safe would have done. Safe would have been good enough and instead he had neither and until the sun went down there wasn't much he could even do to fix it. 

He had helped with the searches when they had first come back to the city. The Shadowhunters had searched all the properties of Mortmain’s that they knew of: the mansion, a townhouse, all the factories. They weren’t as a collective looking for one spy girl. They were collecting information and spell books and plans so that Mortmain’s allies couldn’t find them once they realized what had happened. 

Jem was looking for Tessa. Everything else he found in factory work rooms and beneath assembly lines was incidental. He'd been a little surprised to find that that was Will's primary concern as well. The others treated Will's need to find her as completely expected. She had been his responsibility and he'd been protective. When the tracking spells failed, Jem found himself talking Will's frustration down instead of expressing his own.

"I have an idea," Will said which wasn't really an answer to the question Jem had asked but still told him what he needed to know. Will wore gear that was tattered around the edges. His hair was disheveled and he had slept less than Jem had. 

"But?" Jem said. 

"You won't like it," Will told him. "It might work but if it does," he paused and looked away, "You won't like it." 

"Something to find Tess?" he asked. 

Will nodded and looked back at him. Jem sat on one of Henry's tall, mismatched barstools that stood around the high table. Will leaned against the table and pushed a half built something or other to the side so that he could see clearly. Will's nerves were contagious and the anxiety was coming off him in waves.  

"You're a vampire," Will said and Jem suppressed the sarcasm that he wanted to meet that with and waited for Will to continue. Will hesitated before rushing through it, "She's in thrall to you in some way. We met a Darkling and he could see it. He thought she was one of them." 

Jem stared at him and fought with his expression for a moment before his voice came out even and angrier than he’d expected, "She's not a Darkling. Never. She is not."

"She's something," Will said not quite looking at him. "There's magic in the bite. There's a connection. You might be able to follow it to her."

Jem put his forehead down against the table. The wood was pine, he could smell that even through the oil and the herbs and the chemicals that Henry had spilled on it over the years. He couldn't school his features into any expression that was less than horrified so he kept his head down. 

"I am a monster," he said. 

"You aren't," Will said in an even voice, "You kept her safe and you gave her hope when she had none. I don't know if this will work but I don't have any other ideas, Jem. She isn't in any of his houses or any of the factories that we know of. She wasn't in Cadair Idris where she told me she would be." 

"Unless she's dead," Jem said. "Magnus's spell only found the living. They haven't searched the entire place yet. Katherine and Aloysius are still in there and the spell couldn't find them." 

The thought had been there since he'd come back to the house with the dawn while everyone else was still searching. It was painful to say out loud. That didn’t make it less of a possibility. It was also possible she was being held in Dublin or Shreveport or some tiny town that Jem didn't even know the name of. There were so many possibilities but one of them had haunted his thoughts all day far more than the others. 

"You'd rather accept that than try this?" Will said. His expression wasn't angry but it also wasn't exactly friendly. It was the type of look that Will gave other people. It made Jem straighten his spine and look at him directly. There was so much that didn't need to be said between the two of them. Jem held Will's gaze. 

"You do realize why she sent us to Wales, don't you?" Will said crossing his arms where they rested on the table. It was a defensive position. Will still looked at him with that near hostility that Jem had thought he was immune to. 

"Because she thought that was where he would take her," Jem said. 

"Because she didn't care if that was where he took her," Will said. "She did not so much as suggest that there was anywhere else she might be. She did not tell me where to find her. She told me where to find _you_. That's what the note was. It had nothing to do with saving herself. She went back expecting that no one would come for her. She made the decision to save your life over her own. You are a better man than to abandon her after that. There is nothing that isn’t worth trying."

Then he got up and left. 

Jem stayed staring at the spot that he had been in a moment before. He had no idea how to do what Will was suggesting. His head dropped back down and he tried to find calm.

He called up all the good memories of Tessa and wrapped them around himself like armour. He had said it and now he couldn't put it back in the box. It was a little like Pandora's box of evils but this was only one thing came out over and over and over. 

Tessa could be dead. 

Once he'd been the one to nearly kill her. He had felt her heart slow. He'd seen her laid out on a stone floor barely breathing. It had been his fault. Now that memory hammered at the back of his eyes. 

He pushed back from the table and went to lay down on the little cot in the corner. Henry probably slept there most nights but Sophie had managed to find him clean bedding, old but clean. He lay down on his back and stared up at the ceiling. He breathed and catalogued smells. Vinegar and pine and something moldy. Rust and smoke and something oily. Metal and stone and something floral. The floral smell brought Tessa back. She sometimes smelled like lavender soap. He reached for memories of her again. 

Then he reached past the memories for just her. Detail by detail. Lips and hair and her fingers. The layers of scents that made her unique. Lavender and spices and something like spring mornings. He tried to find that sensation that came to him when he knew that she was outside his door before she opened it. He tried to call up that feeling of having her near when she was hundreds of miles away. That spark of anxiety that came from nowhere when he sat alone in his cage while she was gone. Her anxiety, not his.

Will was right. 

There was something there. 

The desperate incomplete part of his heart that wanted her more than anything else would have lunged for it but he pulled away and curled around himself instead. She was tied to him. He'd trapped her. He'd bit her so many times that he hadn't just left scars on her skin. He choked on that knowledge. It felt more monstrous than the feeding ever had. 

His heart won out over his mind’s revulsion at the idea and he reached through the memories to her again. Just an impression. He swallowed down the self loathing and pushed at the impression. 

It shoved back. 

He'd expected to break through somehow instead he was pushed violently back into his own head. She was a warlock. She was stronger than he was and she'd pushed him out. Which meant that she was alive. He laughed. His head hurt but he laughed because she was alive and strong enough to give him a headache. 

He reached for her again, more gently. He tried to make it a question, a request but he met resistance. A wall that held him back. If he hadn't been sure it was her, he wouldn't have been able to tell. There was no personality in this. Just a barrier. 

"Tessa, please," he said aloud as he pressed worry and love at the wall. He couldn't hide it like this, he couldn't build the wall that she could. He sent her all the love he hadn't been able to tell her about.

"Tell me where you are," he said to the empty workroom and the mental block.. 

Then the barrier broke and he fell into that impression. His senses drowned in her though she wasn't there. A swirl of sensations and emotions. He was aware of a difficulty breathing though it wasn't his body that needed air. Pain though he was uninjured. Fear and exhaustion and hope and disgust and triumph and then relief. Relief and recognition as she realized that it was him and reached back. 

 

He was crying when Will came back. The connection had fallen away. It wasn't meant to be used like that. They'd both held to it but they'd lost it. He curled around his uninjured arm that still hurt with a sympathetic pain and tried to quiet two separate sets of emotions. There were bloody tears on his cheeks. Will was above him with a look on his face that approached panic. 

"I don't know where it is," Jem said. 

"James?" Will's voice was all concern. That hostility was gone and Jem was not too distracted to be glad of it. He sat up and tried not to look deranged though he had no idea how well he was managing. 

"I'll recognize it when I see it. Red brick, white trim, a hedge and a flower garden. 382. Water, a stream or a fountain, I don't know," he said trying to pull details out of the storm of impressions he'd received from Tessa. She hated the place so much and he kept getting lost in the aversion. It was hard to pull up details that might be useful. 

“It’s a room inside, large but windowless, blue wallpaper, automatons, so much blood,” he wasn’t sure anymore what might be useful. 

"You found her, she's not dead," Will said. 

"No," he said. "She's hurt but she's not dead." 

Jem almost laughed again with the relief of that. Will’s panic became something more confident. Tessa’s faith in him still flowed through his chest like it was his own emotion. It was a little harder to believe himself a monster when he could feel that trust and Will was giving him that sideways grin. 

It felt suddenly possible that they could find her and bring her home.


	25. It Would Be Worse

* * *

Tessa Gray

November 9, 1882

* * *

 

Tessa sat with her back to the wall and her eyes shut. She'd chosen a spot as far from the blood soaked carpet as she could get. The door wouldn't open and she had neither the right magic nor a stele with which to force it. The room was full of empty automatons who had all converged on Mortmain's body when he'd fallen. She could see them, shining heads and shoulders in livery all facing away from her. The body was hidden by the furniture.

That was intentional. She sat so she couldn't see it, even accidentally.

The automaton that had held her had frozen had grabbed so tightly that she hadn't been able to breathe. Pulling loose had taken the smallest body in her arsenal of remembered changes. Even still, she had cracked ribs and a broken hand. The ribs the automaton had given her when it had caught her but the hand was her own doing.

She had changed and the smaller body was able to breathe which was better than Tessa's body could do with the arm cinched around her waist. To get herself free she had used her unrestrained hand to brace herself against the automatons head and shoulders and climb up.

Then she'd fallen.

The hand that had held her wrist was just a little too tight for the hand to slip free. The metal had torn Tessa's arm leaving angry wounds where her skin had been rubbed raw in the struggle to free herself. When she'd lost her grip and fallen her weight had pulled her hand loose but it had done so at the expense of small bones in her wrist and thumb that throbbed now.

She held it cradled low in her lap and concentrated on breathing past the pain and planning and trying to find Jem. He had slammed into her mind with all the invasive force of the old compulsion spell that had tortured her for so long. She'd panicked and pushed him back. The force had eased immediately and became a steady weight. She’d held it back until she was sure that she wasn’t imagining the warmth and the reassurance of it.

It was him.

When she dropped the barrier that held her mind separate, it was too much. Too deep, too intimate, too overwhelming but for those moments she hadn't been alone. There weren't words. It might not have been so unsettling if there were words but it was all emotion. He was miserable and heartbroken in ways she couldn't quite make sense of. But the overriding sense of it had been all the things she wanted to say to him coming back to her. It was love and warmth and kindness and safety. It had been home. She kept reaching for it again but she couldn't find it.

He was coming to find her. She'd pushed every memory of the horrible little house at him when his emotions had become worried and seeking and questioning. If he was coming to find her then Will had gotten him out. She hadn't thought she'd lost that much time. Had it been a week? She thought it couldn't have been more than a few days but it would have taken them a week to get there and to get back. Jem had been so very certain.

Someone out there was coming for her.

* * *

When she heard the door she woke from a near sleep with a start. She couldn't see the door from where she was any more than she could see the body. All she could see was the brocade fabric that upholstered the sofa in front of her. In the painful process of getting her feet under her, she heard the voices.

"So, he is dead," the voice was female and made Tessa slide back to the floor and bite back hard on the urge to cry. She was done crying.

"It would appear so," her sister answered.

The Dark Sisters had met her off the ship from New York and they'd been the worst part of her life every day since. She would rather have been left alone with Mortmain in one of his rare but violent rages than the two of them with their wheedling voices and small cruelties. They had taught her magic. First the change then the little spells to levitate and conjure. They'd never hurt her in the same way that Mortmain had but they'd been worse in so many ways.

Inescapable. Petty. Always there. Sometimes only once a week for lessons, other times she'd spend days in their company. They hated her enough to arrange for things that would make her unhappy simply because they could. They had burned her books. They had destroyed any dress that she showed a preference for. When she'd said that she enjoyed visiting the park, they had made sure that she never went again. That had been before she'd lost her voice. It had been an attempt at polite conversation back when she'd been trying to convince herself that her brother was right and there might be life for her in all this.

"Do we raise him do you think?" Mrs. Dark's voice dragged across Tessa's nerves.

"We'd have to get the Book from that awful Shadowhunter," Mrs. Black answered. "And then he would be alive again."

"Alive is not untethered," Mrs. Dark said.

Tessa could see the plan as they intended it. Mortmain had built the network of business contacts. He was rich and he was powerful and both the Mundanes and Downworld listened to him. They would resurrect him, a puppet corpse to play the public face as they assumed control. These two warlocks would finish what Mortmain had began.

And it would be worse.

Axel Mortmain was a monster who believed in the righteousness of all he had done. He thought he was making the world better with his trail of dead. Mrs. Black would erect gallows outside of orphanages just because she thought it was entertaining. She would burn every book in England because someone she didn't like told her reading was a comfort. She would kill every baby born with blue eyes if she decided that blue eyes were vexing.

Tessa didn't move. Her dress was stiff with dried blood and she didn't want it to scratch against the carpet and alert them to her presence. She cast around for a weapon but in her haste to get away from the blood she'd backed herself into an empty corner. It had felt safer when she'd been panicked and alone. There was a fake fern made of felt and wire sitting in a ceramic pot. That was as near to a weapon as she had.

She waited for the warlocks to start talking in that back and forth rhythm they had before inching a little closer to the fern. The ceramic looked heavy enough that she might be able to hurt someone with it if she had the element of surprise.

In the dark behind her eyelids, she reached for Jem one last time before doing something alarmingly stupid. He was there this time and he reached back for her. The urge to lose herself in it was so strong it nearly overpowered her resolve. Instead she held up just enough of a barrier to keep him from latching on. Worry lapped at it like a rising tide against a break wall. She showed him all the love and resolve and pretended that it wasn't a goodbye. She pushed him back out of her mind and slammed the door.

Will wasn't reachable by psychic connection but she found his face in her mind's eye. He was unlike anyone else she had ever known, a person forged of emotions more than he was made of anything else. If she died here, he would blame himself for it and she wished for some way to tell him not to. Jem had said to her once that the world was better with Will in it and she truly understood that now. Her world was better for having him in it.

The Dark Sisters did not seem to be aware that she was in the room. Mrs. Dark had sat down on one of the armchairs by the fire which they had started up again. Tessa could make out the shadows of feet. The room smelled of death and the heat was making it worse but they seemed not to care as they talked. Back and forth, back and forth. Tessa had thought it was a performance for her benefit but they seemed to just speak like that.

She couldn't see much of what they were doing but she heard enough to know that they had used magic to push back the automatons and were examining the body.

"He hasn't started to rot yet," Mrs. Black said.

"Probably all that magic in his veins. That he considered himself human at all was pure vanity," Mrs. Dark said.

Tessa had heard a squelching that she hoped had to do with the soaked carpet and not with whatever the sisters were doing to the body. She was invisible and silent.

She could hide. They would haul Mortmain away and she'd never have to see the ruined mess she'd made of another living thing. And then she could leave. Before they raised him again, she could get on a ferry and go to France. She was legally Mortmain's wife, a mundane bank would probably allow her withdraw his money. She could get very rich and then get very far away. Maybe even go home. Go back to New York where she knew no one.

It wasn't a fantasy that held much allure.

Jem was back in her mind, tugging at her attention. She didn't let him in but it felt like an answer. If the sisters took Mortmain's body from this room, it wasn't over. Jem's freedom wouldn't matter. Will's safety wouldn't matter. Sophie's little house would keep filling up with orphan children learning to fight for their lives before they were old enough to put their hair up. Tessa probably couldn't stop the two warlocks but she couldn't hide in the corner and wait for it to happen either.

She had only one good hand and she used it to grab the pot and tug it toward her while the sisters were nattering. It was heavy but not too heavy to lift. A blue design against the white sketched out pastoral country scenes. Tessa had first learned how to fight with a vampire and werewolf in a stone corridor with parasols and cutlery. This was still most absurd weapon she had ever even considered using.

Silence fell. They'd finally heard her. She heard footsteps but couldn't tell which way they were moving. Getting to her feet so she was crouched below the line of the sofa rather than sitting made more noise and was sure to draw their attention. She set her feet in a stance that would give her as much power as possible.

"Hello, Theresa," Mrs. Dark's face appeared over the top of the sofa.

"Is this her mess then, sister?" Mrs. Black's voice answered.

Tessa didn't wait to find out what else they might have to say, she swung the fake plant up and into the side of Mrs. Dark's head. She'd thrown all her weight into it and the ceramic shattered and the leaves of the fern fell away. Tessa stood with the shard of the pot still clutched in her hand. Mrs. Dark snarled and grabbed for Tessa. She caught hold of Tessa's injured arm and dragged her forward. The pain made her scream and she was surprised to find that she had been thrown to the floor before she could regain her composure.

Mrs. Dark bled from a wound on the side of her sallow face. Tessa scrambled into a sitting position but the woman was standing on her skirts and it stopped her from getting to her feet. Her ribs howled in pain and she ignored them while tightening her fingers on the broken piece of pottery.

"Violent little bitch, aren't you?" she said.

"I had excellent teachers," Tessa snapped. There was no reason to keep up the silence any more. Her voice came out rasping and painful. She interrupted Mrs. Dark's next comment by kicking her hard in the knee. Tessa was discovering she had the strength that came with Shadowhunter heritage. Mrs. Dark screamed and stumbled away. Tessa couldn't see through the bright blue skirts if she'd done any damage but she had felt the knee crunch in the wrong direction.

Mrs. Black grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her up. Tessa's legs lashed out but couldn't make contact. Stars exploded behind her eyes as she hit the wall. She lost all ability to breathe for a terrifying moment but it was shock not collapsing lungs. As air rushed back into her she used the last bit of her makeshift weapon to stab at Mrs. Black's side. It sunk in but not easily. Tessa pushed, trying to force the woman back away from her. She got a slap and a growled insult for it.

She felt the current of magic before it became anything. Tessa Gray was part of Mortmain's plan for immortality and the ruin of the Nephilim. The Dark Sisters didn't need her. The animosity and the annoyance, the little jabs and comments over the years, were all written across Mrs. Black's face. The magic gathered and threatened. Tessa was a fraction of her age, had a fraction of her training, she didn't know what was about to happen but she couldn't win against it.

She squared her shoulders: back straight, chin up and eyes shut. She refused to have Mrs. Black's face be the only thing she could see when she died but she wasn't going to cower. Gore streaked, battered, bleeding but not hiding.

"You are nothing," Mrs. Black said to her. Her breathing was unsteady and her voice was pained. Tessa didn't expect to win but she hadn't let go of her jagged little weapon - it was still buried in Mrs. Black's side, just below her ribs.

"And you're less than that," Tessa said without opening her eyes. All her senses were occupied by the spell. It was terrifying and far beyond any magic that she understood.

The noises in the rest of the room: Mrs. Dark's voice, something thumping, all of it was secondary to this impending magic.

There was a whistling sound and the pressure of a building magic collapsed. Something warm and wet sprayed over Tessa's face and she cried out. Mrs. Black's hand in her hair loosened and was gone and then closed again on her elbow. She kicked out.

"You should really stop attacking me when I try to rescue you," a familiar voice said. Tessa wiped the wet away from her eyes and looked up at Will. He had blood spray across one cheek and wore black. His eyes were bluer than she remembered them being, lit up by whatever emotion was fueling the dangerous half smile on his lips.

Mrs. Black was crumpled on the floor and Will was trying to pull her away from the body and the head. The head which was no longer attached. She was struck dumb by the sight of it. Mrs. Black's body lay on its stomach but her head stared unseeing at the ceiling over a foot away in another pool of spreading blood.

A keening wail pulled her back to her senses. Mrs. Dark was the source of it but Tessa's frazzled nerves didn't allow her attention to get that far. Jem met her eye from across the room. He held a proper sword, wore the same black gear that Will did and looked cleaner and healthier than she had ever seen him. The wail picked up again and Jem's attention at least snapped back to Mrs. Dark. Tessa's didn't. She let Will pull her away from the body and towards the door but her eyes were on Jem.

"You killed her," Mrs. Dark's wail resolved into words.

"It does appear so, yes," Will said that half grin stretching wider. He was all dangerous warrior with none of the affectionate joking or chaotic emotions that she thought of when she pictured him. This was the Will who had intimidated her when they'd first met.

"Nephilim bastards," she said.

"I take offense to that," Jem said in a tone that matched Will's dangerous humour.

"Would you prefer bloodsucking bastard? Or perhaps simply vampire bastard?" Will suggested.

"That joke was no longer funny after the second time you made it," Jem said evenly. "Besides, I was objecting to the bastard part if you must know."

They were both coiled springs. The conversation belied the fighting stances and the drawn weapons. Mrs. Black's blood was running down the shining edge of Will's sword and dripping to the floor. They didn't look at each other as they spoke. They were both looking at the threat in the room. Will hadn't stepped away from Tessa but when Jem adjusted his footing, so did Will. When one of them moved the other wouldn't be far behind.

Mrs. Dark was calculating. Tessa watched her eyes dart around the room.

"She wants Mortmain's body. They want to bring him back to life," Tessa said in a quiet voice. Will was close enough to hear and she knew how sharp Jem's ears were. Jem tilted his head in response. Tessa couldn't see the expression that went with it but Mrs. Dark grimaced at him.

When she moved, she moved far faster than she should have been able. Both the Shadowhunters whirled in response but Tessa had been wrong. They moved to cut her off from the path to Mortmain's corpse but she was headed for her sister's. Jem and Will moved like a single unit. It was almost eerie to watch. It was as though they were connected by invisible strings that moved them in tandem.

Mrs. Dark was outside the path of their weapons.

She looked back at Tessa for a moment when she reached the body. Then she closed one hand on her sister's yellow silk covered shoulder and pulled her severed head in with the other. Cradling the head in her lap, she said an incantation that Tessa didn't hear and they both vanished.

Jem skidded to a stop where they had been and glanced around. Will prodded the air with his sword tip as though checking that they were truly gone and not just invisible. Tessa watched them. She had never been able to picture them together but here they were. A matched set, not alike, not the same but matched. She smiled at them though they weren't looking at her. Will turned back to her first but it was Jem who caught her when she lost the battle she had been fighting against gravity.

"Tessa?" Jem's hand was on her face and she blinked her eyes open. When he pulled his hand back, it was bloody. With the immediate threat gone, the adrenaline was draining away and it took her remaining strength with it. She leaned towards Jem. He worked that magic wherein he folded his arms around her and created a safe place.


	26. Not Alone

Tessa let go and Jem could feel it. The connection he had opened terrified him but he felt echo of the feeling somewhere inside as much as he felt it as she relaxed into him. She gave up on trying to protect herself. She would let him do it. She trusted him enough.

Jem's heart hurt with that knowledge.

He didn't feel worthy of being trusted. He didn't feel worthy of being someone else's protector but he could not leave her. The idea was like peeling his skin off. He gathered her into his arms and Will opened the doors until they found one that had a lady’s things in it. It was Will who went to find the sentry and the other search teams and tell them what they had found. Jem held the girl who had kept him human after he'd become a monster and waited for her to wake again.

She had fallen unconscious in his arms. Her head rested against his shoulder and her wounded arm was tucked across her stomach. With so much else to be angry about the blood on her face and the shredded skin of her arm were what Jem kept coming back to. If he were thinking with propriety in mind, he might have laid her down in the wide bed and tucked the covers around her until a doctor could see her. Instead he had sank into the settee and held her.

She woke for the first time just after Will had arrived back. Her body shifted and she made a pained sound that made Jem want to kill anyone who had ever touched her. Instead he touched her face and whispered things in Chinese too softly for Will to hear in the next room where he was ordering people about. He told her the things he didn't know how to say to her in English.

She didn't say anything until after she'd opened her eyes. She had spent too long waking to potentially dangerous situations to say anything before she was fully awake. Her eyes were wide and gray as storm clouds. They sharpened and focused and then she smiled. He smiled back.

"Jem," she said, the way she always had, a single syllable though he knew that now she could give speeches if she chose to. She didn't need to in that moment. His name was enough. Her eyes trapped him. He was the one capable of compulsion and yet he felt helpless to do anything but stare into those eyes. She lay in his arms and had to look up at him.

"Hello James," she said a moment later, "We haven't been properly introduced, my name is Theresa Gray."

He laughed and pulled her a little closer as carefully as possible so he wouldn't hurt her. He kissed her forehead and said, "It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Will found you," she said and the hint of a smile didn't leave her lips. She was hurt and exhausted but happier than he had ever known her to be.

"And you saved the world. Tessa," his voice faltered. All the things he'd been able to tell her in Chinese when she was asleep and couldn't understand him came rushing through his head but they wouldn't organize themselves in any way that he could make sense of.

"I killed a monster. It wasn't so grand as all that," she said tucking her head back into his shoulder where he couldn't see her face.

"It is as grand as all that, Tess, it is," he bent over her so that his lips were against her hair as he spoke, "You have the soul of a warrior. He tried to destroy you over and over. He tried to make you a tool, a piece of his grand scheme and you stood against him. Alone. You stood against him and you won."

"I wasn't," she said.

"You won," he said.

"Not alone. I wasn't alone. I couldn't do it when I was alone. I could barely force myself to breathe each day when I was alone. This," she played with the angel around her neck. He had never seen her without it. She made a decision, there was a change in her voice as she continued, more sure, "This was was my mother's. I wore it because it reminded me of her and it made me feel safe and secure. It's an angel. A true one. A piece of a angel's soul held like the demon souls in that Shadowhunter box that Mortmain had."

Jem recoiled on some instinctive level. He was a Shadowhunter and they were the Angel's children. There wasn't a blasphemy that he could imagine that ran deeper than trapping an angel in a prison like that. He touched it where it was held between her fingers. It felt like a toy. It ticked like a watch. It didn't look like a prison but he couldn’t shake the unease it evoked now that he knew what it was.

"It is calibrated to protect my life," she said. "Mortmain gave it to my mother before I was born. She took it with them when they left England. They ran from him but she kept the angel because she had believed him when he'd told her that it would keep me safe. I didn't know what was inside. I don't believe that my mother did either."

She paused as though saying so much at once was tiring. Jem stroked his fingers through her hair. It was stiff with dried blood and he didn't care. When Will appeared in the doorway with Charlotte, Jem sent them away with a little shake of his head. Will he might have allowed near her when she was like this but even Charlotte was too much. Charlotte would ask questions and need Tessa to give her answers. Will made the excuses and kept everyone else away. Jem was grateful that he wasn’t the only one trying to keep her safe.

"It doesn't come off," she said once the soft steps in the hall were gone and they were alone. Jem was half convinced that she had fallen asleep again until her voice came soft but steady.

"I've never seen you without it," he said when she went quiet again.

"I used to be able to take it off, it used to be a piece of jewelry like any other. Then, after Nate died, after the wedding, after they burned my books and the nice family in Wales happily returned me to my worried family who had come looking for the missing mute girl. After all that. Before you but after all of that," she stopped and Jem suddenly knew exactly what she would say next and he did not want to hear it. He pulled her in again and this time she wrapped her good arm around his neck so that she could hold onto him too.

"It saved me from that too," she said. "It even saved me from myself. I will live forever unless something kills me and this ensures that nothing can kill me. Hurt me, yes, but not kill me. It is no longer removable. The chain is sealed and enchanted."

She stopped talking and turned herself so she was looking him in the eye when she said, "I couldn't do it when I was alone."

"You are never alone. I swear to you that you are never alone. You fought and you fought and you're still here. You have everything ahead of you Tessa," he said. There were tears in his eyes and he blinked them back as he took her face in his hands. "And thank you. I could not do it when I was alone either. There must have been weeks where I did not move. You gave me hope every day. You are not alone."

"Neither are you," she said.

She tasted like other people's blood when she kissed him very gently and he answered it as carefully as he could. He kissed her like she was precious and fragile. He wiped tears off her cheeks and she settled back into his arms like she belonged there. She lapsed back out of consciousness. He didn't quite have himself in check when Will knocked and then pushed open the door with a plate of food.

Will gave him a concerned look. He had been distracted when he'd opened the door but whatever expression was still on Jem's face made him frown and forget about everything else. He dropped the food off on the table and looked at Jem and then Tessa as though searching for the new wound. That the wounds were old and invisible was something Jem would tell him later.

"I don't like her hurt," he said which was true if it left out the wider problems. "She acts as though this isn't the worse she's ever been hurt and I can't stomach the idea of it being worse. She deserves a family that loves her instead of selling her out to monsters. She deserves to never have another bruise as long as she lives. She deserves rooms full of books with open windows on sunny days. She deserves better, Will. She should be happy."

"I never considered this happening to you," Will said and there was humour in his voice. Jem frowned and looked over at him. He was eating the food he had brought for Tessa and he had a half smile on his face. There was a flash of worry and sadness when he looked down at her that Jem almost missed. Will was still talking, "You've fallen madly in love, haven't you?"

"I care about her," Jem said.

"Which is Jem-lish for madly in love. You understate things sometimes, were you aware?" Will said.

"Jem-lish?" Jem said.

"Like English is the language of the people of England, Jem-lish is a language specific to you. Made up of Chinese and English and just a little bit of Sanskrit when you want to swear creatively. It also features understatement and wording things very carefully so as to not lie while still saying 'I do not feel ill' when the truth is that you are about to faint," Will said gesturing with a piece of bread.

"This is who you truly are," Jem said ignoring everything that Will had actually said. Jem knew when he was being distracted but he was thankful for it.

"Unless I have been replaced by a body swapping demon or a shapeshifting girl but no, it appears she is still right there, I must be me," Will said.

"You have been a warrior, a leader and a strategist since I got here. Before, when we were young, you were a bastard and a fountain of terrible jokes. The truth, the person you truly are is somewhere in between. The leader of men with a heart of gold and an unending supply of terrible jokes," Jem said.

"I don't know whether to thank you or hit you, was that a compliment?" Will asked.

"It's true. It wasn't meant as a compliment, just an observation. May I tell you something William?" Jem asked. Will looked skeptical but nodded as he chewed slowly on his piece of bread. "I'm looking forward to getting to know this new you. No curse, less lying, perhaps even less absurdity, it'll be a treat."

"What are you talking about?" Tessa asked and they both looked at her. She struggled into a sitting position and Jem helped guide her so she could sit between them rather than half lay in his arms. She didn't like to be helpless and she drew herself up to sit up straight and tall.

They made up lies about what they had been talking about as Tessa ate. She smiled and shook her head the more absurd ones and looked at them with skeptical eyes as they added more and more layers to the plausible ones until they were just as silly. She watched them as the conversation bounced back and forth as though she was watching something endearing and incredible.

When Will was called away, she smiled after him.

"You like him," Jem said, "I used to wonder if you would. Most people don't. He isn't an easy person to like. All the good in Will is - was - buried."

"It's there. It isn't there in everyone but it is there in him," she said. "He is one of those rare people who is good. I'm glad to know him."

Her voice was fading and when she leaned over to rest her head on his shoulder, he pulled her back into his arms. He had spent so long having every minute with her metered that it was a felt like a miracle to know that he didn't have to leave her.

He hummed out a tune as he watched her sleep. It was an attempt to put a feeling into music. He hadn't done it since his joints had become too weak to hold the bow long before he'd become a vampire. He let the memory of the music pour through him as he imagined the chords and melodies that would make up who she was.

"He's right," he whispered to her as she slept. She murmured and shifted in his arms but didn't wake. He touched her cheek and said, "I am in love with you."

 

 


	27. Promises Kept

* * *

William Herondale

November 9, 1882

* * *

 

The house buzzed with people in the early dawn. Somehow, the Shadowhunter resistance had never found this place. They had thought they knew all of Mortmain's houses but this one had no automaton guard posted outside nor did he ever host parties here. It had the strange air of being the place that he might actually have considered his home. It was decorated in a personal style with diagrams and maps and bits of his travels. In the center of the house was a room that was heavily fortified with both magics and physical barricades. If Jem hadn't known exactly where the door was, the glamours would have kept them from finding it.

Now that room was full of Shadowhunters. The body was being cut into pieces to make a resurrection as close to impossible as they could manage. It was a desecration of the dead but they had all seen or at the very least heard of Mortmain's trophy cases of spoils and his hall of prisoners. Nobody felt much guilt over removing his head so it could be weighted and tossed into the sea.

Jem had talked through Tessa's scattered impressions and Will had made lists. Landmarks and shops that she remembered that they could find. Jem had been right, he had recognized the house immediately. They'd made it there ahead of the others that were also searching based on descriptions. The Lightwoods hadn't been far behind them and Will knew that Cecily was downstairs going through Mortmain's personal correspondence right now.

Tessa had another neat but impersonal room that locked from the outside in this house. Will stepped into it carrying a jug and sat down on the far side of her little settee. She was leaned against Jem's chest and he had his chin on her hair. She was still blood soaked and was in and out of consciousness but she was calm and she was breathing. When she was awake enough to meet his gaze, she smiled at him.

"Is she awake?" Will asked.

"Sometimes," Jem told him, "Were they able to find a warlock healer?"

"Magnus said he'd come but he isn't here yet," Will said.

The Shadowhunters were avoiding the little bedroom because Will had told them to leave her be. Magnus had accused Will of being a touch protective of Tessa but it didn’t hold a candle to Jem. He had barely let go of her. While she was sleeping he admitted that though he knew that awful things had happened to her, he had never before seen the evidence of it. She'd always been healed and whole by the time she came to see him.

Will made sure that Jem didn't need to let her out of his sight. He wasn't sure he could have left her alone with anyone else when she was that vulnerable. She had trouble sitting up on her own after all the exhaustion and injuries and over extended magic. He had gone down to find water for her to drink, food, cloths to get the worst of the blood off.

Will had left them alone to whispered conversations that they'd never been able to have before and come back to find them like this. Snuggled together. Jem smiled at him over her head.

Will wanted to touch Tessa's face, check that she was still warm and still breathing. He wanted to rewrite the world so that she never had another broken bone. He didn't and he couldn't so he took a knife out of his belt and cut the fabric of her dress away from her torn arm. He pulled it a little closer to him and she murmured in protest but didn't wake. She sat with her knees over Jem's lap and Will had to adjust her feet a little to sit close enough to clean the wound. He could pick out the finger marks of the automaton on her forearm where the bruising was deepest.

She was bloody and filthy and once again fighting broken ribs for each breath. He'd made a joke about it and had gotten a small but genuine smile. It wasn't laughter but it had been happy and she so rarely looked happy. That he found her beautiful even like this was not something to allow himself to dwell on. One did not opine on the beauty of the girl in your best friend's arms.

That she was a hero he did allow himself to think on. Will was determined that the Clave not forget that. There had already been talk of "that warlock girl" and it made him want to hit them.

He looked up from the bloody cloth in his hand and she was looking down at him with blue gray eyes. Jem had helped her wash most of the blood off her face before she'd started drifting in exhaustion but there was still blood in her hair. Her own, Mortmain's, and more than a little from the snarling warlock that Will had beheaded.

"I'm sorry, I snuck away," she said to him her voice still thick.

"Don't be," he said. "You were right. And you did it just as you said you could."

"Is he really dead?" she asked.

It was Jem who answered her, "They're down there cutting off his head."

"Good," she said. "Was London nice?" When Will looked confused and Jem didn't answer she said, "I never saw London before the automatons, was it nice once?"

"And I behold London, a Human awful wonder of God," Will said and she gave him another smile, recognizing the quote. He still held her wrist and the skin was warm. Her fingers lay against his forearm.

"You and the poetry," Jem said and Will could hear both the smile and the mock disgust in his voice.

"I like it," Tessa said.

"Good, he can quote it at you and leave me in peace," Jem said and Will could see the smile this time.

"You'd miss it if I never quoted literature at you," Will said, "And the Angel knows you need it or else you'd never get any culture at all." Tessa laughed at that sitting up a little. It was a short gentle sound cut short by her injured ribs but it made Will laugh back.

"Do you always keep your promises?" she asked.

"Never, not once," Will said immediately, unable to stop smiling. Jem shook his head at him in that fond but exasperated way that he had been doing since they were children. They had spent almost as long apart as they had been together. Six years as parabatai and four years without being in the same room but Will couldn't really feel the time apart.

"You promised you'd help me get free and you promised you'd make me laugh," she said. "You're doing quite well."

"I also once promised Jessamine that I would replace the bell in Big Ben with a cage full of ferrets so I can't be trusted too far," Will told her.

"There's still time for ferrets and bell towers and everything else," Tessa told him. "We've so much time."

She reached out with her good hand and wrapped her fingers around Will's. She was tucked into Jem's arms and she laid her head back against his chest. Jem laid on his cool narrow hands over theirs. A piece of Will's chest ached to pull her in so she cuddled up to him like that but a larger part, a louder part, was so enormously grateful to have the two of them there that it was drowning out any other feeling.

 

Hell had come to London and he'd lost everything and after that Will hadn't bothered with futures that lasted beyond the week.

Now he sat with the future laid out before him. It was hazy but it was there. His sister had pulled a face at him over a dining room table earlier that day. Charlotte was busy gently but firmly wrenching control of the resistance back from Margaret and Rupert. She was arguing with Gabriel Lightwood and his team of Clave envoys on behalf of the Cadair Idris prisoners and the Downworlders like Magnus Bane who had stood by the resistance. The Clave itself was reopening the passages that connected England to Alicante and the Silent City.

There was a future there that stretched farther than the next few days.

A future that had these two people in it.

“Dw i’n dy garu di,” he said to them. Tessa had started to doze again but she roused herself. Both her soft grey eyes and Jem's bright silver ones were on him.

"What does it mean?" she said, "You said it before." Will cursed his stupid mouth for talking faster than his thoughts had gone. Of course she would remember. Then he smiled because of course she would remember.

"It means, I'm glad to know you," he said which wasn't entirely a lie though neither was it a translation.

The three of them sat with their hands tangled together, talking softly of ferrets and futures and anything that wasn’t blood and metal monsters. 

The End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to take a moment and thank you for reading. Infernal War is the longest completed piece of fiction I have ever produced and though it started as a half-assed prompt fic, it has become something much bigger that I massive enjoyed plotting, writing and discussing with people over the past few months.
> 
> Though this volume of the story is over. There are two planned sequels in the works that will take this altered version of the TID story up through to the modern day.
> 
> Thank you again for reading. 
> 
> I hope that you found something to enjoy here. I would love to know if you have any comments or questions or hate mail to share.


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